Last updated on April 6th, 2021 at 10:43 am
Sometimes you come across things in life that are so awesome that you can’t help but share them. You’re COMPELLED. They improve your life in ways you would have never imagined, and now, you’d never look back.
With this in mind, cue Instapaper.
I’d heard of Instapaper before—it’s one of those things you see often enough in tech blogs, on Twitter, etc.—I knew it was used to mark things for later reading, but I had no idea why I’d want to use another service that was just like Delicious or Springpad, collecting my bookmarks (albeit conveniently) for later use.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Yesterday I’d mentioned that I was still toiling away on getting documents digitized for my big top-secret project. I’ve mentioned this a number of times before, and I’m almost done with the scanning phase—thank GOODNESS!
It’s involved taking most of the old magazines, newspaper and their clippings that I’ve held onto (for who knows how long) and repurposing them. Some articles I found directly useful for my purposes—some where just things that I didn’t want to bother scanning, but would be interesting for later reading. So, after I’d collected, disassembled and stacked all these articles in a pile, imagine it being about 1,000 sheets high.
Seriously.
But then, enter the ingenuity of Sean Boulton!
Sean had told me that he was working on a variation of my digitizing, taking my actions and putting a twist on them to improve organization in HIS life.
I can be a little slow on the uptake, so he had to explain it to me (totally paraphrasing here):
SB—So you have a stack of articles you want to read, right?
CP—Yup.
SB—And they’re taking up room?
CP—Yup.
SB—And you have an iPod Touch, right?
CP—Yup.
SB—Why don’t you just use Instapaper?
CP—Huh?
SB—It lets you save articles from the Internet so you can read them later.
CP—Yeah, I know. So?
SB—The Instapaper app lets you save it to your iPod Touch so you can read them while you’re offline without access to Wi-Fi.
CP—That SOUNDS cool, but how does it apply…
SB—Magazines GENERALLY post their articles online. You know? The same ones in your massive pile?
CP—…HOLY CRAP.
So if you have racks full of magazines, yellowing newspapers that you’ve yet to read, or websites flagged for later consumption, you should see if Instapaper’s the solution YOU’VE been looking for!
In conclusion, Sean, thank you for increasing my efficiency 1000%. Not only will I be able to quickly recycle all the stuff I have lying around, I won’t need to buy anymore ebooks for a while. (Doesn’t mean I won’t, I just don’t NEED to!)
Thanks Instapaper for creating such a cool app. I already dropped the coin on the app for my iPod Touch so I could take advantage of this on my honeymoon (um, you know, in the moments where my fiancée isn’t awake—I don’t have a death wish here…)
I’m off to finish cleaning up—hey! I think I can see some of the table cloth again! SWEET!!!
86/365
Disclaimer: Instapaper didn’t pay or contact me to write this; I actually think it’s a really cool tool that’s making my life easier. I fully plan to tell them that I wrote it, though. Hey, if I made an app, I’d want to see that people appreciated it.
