Be free of obligations
In truth, I don’t actually like reading later. 99% of the time, if I save something to read later, the fact that I’m not reading it now is a good sign that I don’t actually want to read it and should free myself of the obligation. Saving the article is an act of self-soothing, telling myself “I’m still a good person who wants to read this later.” – I don’t actually like to read later
The idea of freeing yourself of obligations is one I took to heart years ago when my wife said she’d do our business books regularly and then she didn’t. I got annoyed that she didn’t do it and we fought for a year as she was stressed about getting our taxes done and I was…mad. Eventually I realised she had good intentions about doing it but we had little kids and that’s a full-time job so she couldn’t do our receipt entry.
So I removed the obligation from her. I took them back on for a while, then I paid someone to do them for a while, and now I do them again. Most importantly the fighting about that specific aspect of life stopped. She stopped feeling guilty I stopped being mad.
With reading later I think we often save things because we want to be the type of person that reads this article. It’s interesting enough in the moment, but not interesting enough to spend time with right now.
But if not now when?
Possibly the best thing you could do is to set aside some time weekly to read the articles you get to and then remove all the others so they’re an unfulfilled obligation. Do a weekly inbox 0 by just deleting all the stuff you’re never going to get to anyway.
#obligations #productivity #readLater