Reading inbox
As we go through life, we are bombarded with so much information, most of which do not align with our purpose and projects or are just plain noise. Since we need to avoid collecting information and instead internalize those that are truly useful, we need to have a system in place to capture potentially useful reading materials while filtering out the noise. This system is a reading inbox.
A reading inbox only fulfills its purpose if reading materials do not accumulate indiscriminately (efficient inboxes are reliably drained) and if it leads me only to the best materials. To ensure this I follow Andy Matuschak's principles for draining an inbox. When an item is captured in the inbox and reviewed, one of the following could happen to it:
- Gets trashed (not worth reading at all).
- Gets read shallowly.
- Gets read deeply.
Ideally, more materials from the inbox are read than are added. Because of this hard rule, I wonder whether there is any use for a separate Someday/Maybe reading list?
A reading inbox should have the following characteristics:
- zero-friction capture for all kinds of references
- zero-friction to view the reading corresponding to an inbox item
- zero-friction listing across item type (?)
- encourages lingering items to be removed by making it obvious how many times an item have been passed over
Here is my implementation of a reading inbox.