Folio: An Ephemeral Reading List
Just like many other people, I have an overflowing list of things to read/watch/listen. Scrolling on X, see that nice technical blog post someone mentioned? Goes to the reading list. Dwarkesh has a new podcast episode up? Goes to the reading list. 3B1B released a new video? Believe it or not, straight to the reading list. I realised this has been getting out of hand. And I must do something about it.
I surmise that this act of adding endless links to the list is fueled by two related reasons (a list of reasons, if you will). One is plain old fear of missing out on seemingly important information or a bit of knowledge that might be useful. And second, a more sinister reason might be that adding these things to the list gives a false sense of accomplishment that should ideally be attained only after actually having read the thing. Because, in some twisted way, does not matter if I have not read it yet, I could always read it later, since it is right there, in the list. Right? And thus the entire exercise of adding to the reading list is futile.
Well, then I could just actually read the things. Right? That seems like a fair enough solution. Except, I do and I don’t. I do try to read a lot of stuff from what I have bookmarked. And is my go to thing to do during transit times and the likes. Most of the items added are genuinely very interesting to me, that is how they have made it to the list in the first place, and I do read a bunch of those. But the pace of adding content exceeds the pace of consuming it. Consistently so.
When I actually make an active effort of clearing the backlog, that usually results in me reading the most number of articles instead of the best articles. When I scroll through it, I (somewhat subconsciously) know that quickly reading the TechCrunch article about some top executive leaving Meta’s Superintelligence Labs1 is going to be quicker in clearing the backlog than reading the technical blog post about how attention sinks help language models’ stability2. And so this goal of clearing the backlog is not fully aligned with the goal of reading.
The problem is very clear to me, and I hope I have done somewhat of a decent job of laying it out here as well. So to solve my problem, I created folio. It is, what I call, an ephemeral reading list. Ephemeral because things won’t be allowed to stay on it forever. It has 2 simple features.
- Add items to reading list.
- A cap on how many items the inbox can have.
Which means it won’t allow you to add more items to the inbox if your inbox is full. Have you been adding too many items lately? Without reading anything? And want to add another one? Tough luck buddy because it won’t let you. You can choose what you want to do at this point. You can decide if you really want to add this new thing. Will you really read it? If the answer is yes, you can make space for it in the inbox. You can either read an older item (that archives it, thus making the space for a new one), or remove an older item, that you now think is not interesting enough anymore.
This is not to say that I don’t want to read the tech gossip in the news, or that there are the right or wrong kind of things, but some clearly add more value than others. I hope (and anticipate) that this will make me more deliberate in what to read, and more conretely, what to add to the reading list. Sometimes, reading the gossip is exactly what I want to do, and it does not take that much longer to read it than putting the “to-read” tag on it. If I had added it to the list and haven’t read it yet, it would be on the chopping block soon when a more interesting thing comes up.
The general philosophy behind folio is “Read it or lose it” and I think that not only makes me more deliberate in terms of what I add to the list, but also weaponises the fear of missing out on interesting stuff to ensure appropriate things fall on the read-it side instead of the lose-it side.
Until next time, Happy reading!
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It is a wonderful piece and I recommend adding it to your lists ;) ↩