The many facets of my reading workflow needed to be examined and studied. When do I read, using which device and application? How is my reading affecting or contributing to my creative workflow? What happens when I find something interesting while I’m reading? How do I store important information pieces? How do I get back to them? How often and for what purpose? The answer to these numerous questions drive my choice of application for reading.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about ways to improve my reading workflow for a few reasons. First, I want to read more and more consistently. Two, I’m not sure which app is better to support this. I’ve been switching read-later service many times and until now, I wasn’t able to settle on one. Third, when reading, I want to get the most out of it and use the gathered knowledge more effectively. The following diagram depicts the flow of my reading workflow, inspired by the CODE methodology. Each box is explained in more detail below.

Freeform-My Reading Workflow as of 2023-09@2023-09-30@21.26.57@2x.png

First, let’s start with my possible reading sources.

  1. RSS feeds can be imported directly into Omnivore by using the RSS feed address. I follow a few dozen feeds via Inoreader and Reeder, but just a few are selected to go directly into Omnivore for the quality of their content. As I’m writing this, four feeds are configured for direct importation. This feature was only recently introduced into Omnivore, and it works great. Occasionally, I go into Omnivore, select the RSS tag and start reading from there.

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  1. Reeder is a very popular RSS reader. There are so many of them, but something hard to describe in Reeder sets it apart. Simplicity but not simplistic might be a good characterization. Reeder is also a great Inoreader client. Recently, I decided that for interesting articles in Reeder that I want to read, I save them into Things 3. One of the reasons is that when the article is read and analyzed, I can check it off from the to-do list, and Things will log this into the LogBook. I like the journaling capabilities of Things 3. I use it in my weekly creative summary.

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  1. Safari is my go-to browser. Surfing the web triggers reading opportunities. When I’m not ready to plunge into a 2500-word article, I use the Omnivore Safari extension to save it for a read later occasion. Another possibility is to save a bookmark directly into Craft from Safari (via Copy & Paste, thanks to Craft Safari extension limitations). When this happens, it’s because I was looking for something in Safari and needed to keep the bookmark for later use. The same process sometimes happens right in Reeder. In that case, a simple “copy & paste” of the bookmark is executed from Reeder to Craft. But, overall, I try to save a bookmark into Things 3 for the same reason I do it from Reeder. Things 3 helps me keep track in an effective way of all my future readings.

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  1. Things 3 helps me manage and be consistent with my creative activities. Unsurprisingly, it plays a role in the Collect portion of my CODE workflow. For each article I plan to read and possibly analyze, I create a new task in Things 3 with a link to the article in the task’s note. As I wrote previously, each time I check an item from the list, the item is logged in Things 3’s logbook. This way, I keep track of what I have read and when.

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  1. From Things 3, I’ll open the link in Safari for the article I decided to read. Sadly, I cannot save the link from Things 3 to Omnivore directly. It’s possible only through Omnivore’s Safari extension. From there, if I think the article is long enough and needs more thorough reading, I’ll send it to Omnivore. I might save the bookmark into Craft also, depending on my needs. I often visit an article only to copy and paste its URL into a Craft document as a reference. However, I could directly import the article’s content into a new Craft document using a “CraftClip” shortcut. In this scenario, I want to import knowledge into Craft to backlink to it and select the portion to include as a quote in another document.
  2. Omnivore is my go-to “read-later” service. I won’t write a review here (maybe for another article). Once the content is saved into Omnivore (via the Safari browser extension or automatically from the few selected RSS feeds, articles are stored in Omnivore’s Inbox and are available for reading, highlighting, annotation and tagging. The nice thing about Omnivore is that it is free, it is constantly evolving, and, more importantly, I can copy and paste all my highlights and annotations in one click and paste them into a Craft document, and they will be formatted exactly the way it should be.
  3. Omnivore highlights are synced to Readwise. I also copy and paste the link to the stored article back into Craft for easier and quicker access.

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  1. Central to my creative workflow, Craft is a repository of bookmarks from Safari, Reeder, and highlights stored in Readwise. I import those from time to time to consolidate knowledge. Anybox, a bookmarks manager, has a different role of holding bookmarks about specific subjects without contextual information. This is why I don’t consider Anybox part of my reading workflow.
  2. When working on a review or an article about a specific subject, I will create a unique document container in Craft based on a template I made (the template is available for sale here). Everything I read, potentially highlighted and annotated, might be stored in this container as a reference, a bookmark, or the full article. The idea is to bring related things closer together so I can build relations.

My reading workflow might look complex but it really isn’t. I’ve been testing it while reading articles about the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s not perfect but it is close to be just right for my needs. There are always possible improvements, but those will come in due time. Previously, my workflow was centered around Craft, you might take a look at the following video if you are curious.

My Reading Workflow Using Craft

Still to come: how do I read the newsletters I subscribe to? 🤔