I don’t know about you, but I have a bad habit of bookmarking a lot of articles. But there’s a reason I say it’s a bad habit. I bookmark with an app called InstaPaper. InstaPaper is a great little app that simply allows you to save the online articles you’d like to “Read Later.” Big deal you say…well, you can read these articles without Wi-Fi or 3G access, InstaPaper stores them locally on your iPhone to read offline.

Now, enter the media and RSS firehose, Twitter accounts (I have 3,) Facebook and you have a lot of material that might interest you. Me? I fall into the habit all too often of saying, “Read Later,” because somewhere in my brain I think I’ll have the time to read everything I send to InstaPaper. Fortunately (although, that depends on your point of view) InstaPaper only holds 500 articles. I wasn’t aware of this, and to my dismay one day, I was looking for an article and couldn’t find it. That’s when I discovered the cap, which the developer clearly states (and is right) is plenty. If you have over 500 saved articles in InstaPaper, how many do you think you’ll actually get to?

For me it’s a bad habit, chug-a-lugging on the never empty fire hose of content coming at me from all sides. How could I possibly read all of these things? I can’t, but somehow I slide into the habit of pushing that “Read Later” button. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh wow, this is great! I don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’ll just set it aside for later.”

I have found a way to have my cake and eat it too: Evernote. Evernote is another great app for iPhone and Mac desktop that allows you to throw everything you want to remember into organized “notebooks.” This has become as embedded in my work-flow and life that it might as well be implanted in my forearm…oh wait…I’d want my iPhone there first… but I digress. Evernote’s notebooks are filled with what are called “Notes” and they can be anything from a screen shot, and entire web page in PDF format (yes, it let’s you do that,) and it even read text in photos. If you want to know more, go here, a post I wrote a while back about the app.

The other day, I thought I’d try a little trick I’ve been doing with Evernote on my desktop. Sometimes I just do a “select all,” copy and paste (for Evernote there are special keystoked for this,) and I have that shipped to Evernote for safe keeping. While on my InstaPaper page in Safari on my desktop, I did the same thing, just for fun to see what happened. BOOM! My entire insanely long page of article links, right into Evernote, all in one note! Amazing! Now those article links that were near the 500 or 499 mark, are saved forever! Not exactly pretty, but they’re saved…

Now, being a scholar of all in the GTD (Getting Things Done) way of thinking, it may not be good for me, but it’s cool nonetheless. Just because I can do it, doesn’t really mean I should. But hey, if I’m ever in a pinch, I’ll know what to do. How do you use Evernote or InstaPaper?

Posted by Christian Messer on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 4:41 pm.