Insta Later

In the spirit of day 5 of wrting 500 words a day for 31 days, today’s post will be about one of my most used apps that makes instantly saving news articles easy to organize and read for a later time, and that my goal is to read one article a day from its source.

Newspapers are unfortunately seeing slow decline in their physical circulation. Sources such as the New York Times and Washington Post will never go out of season, but when the Detroit Free Press lets go some of their most well-known reporters, it truly is a sign of the times.

The alternative, obviously, is to create news sources online because the quicker word gets out the faster someone finds out about the news. Even though in the past month we are seeing a crack down on fake news sources, the big sources are turning more towards online articles. What has also become a heavily populated environment is blogs, forums, and companies that specifically are an online newspaper, such as the Huffington Post.

I subscribe to many blogs, and visit even more on a daily basis. While I wish I could read faster and have time to read each post right then and there, I simply do not have enough time.

Enter Instapaper.

A few years ago my brother introduced me to Instapaper as an app that allows me to save articles from my iOS devices to the app so I can read at a later time. It even has a plug-in for my laptop so I can save an article from a web browser. My favorite feature about the app is the simplicity of the articles and the accesibility of the articles looking like something from a newspaper. There aren’t ads in the articles, and whenever opened it syncs and updates the most current collection of articles in the app.

At the time, I bought the app at $2.99 and it just recently gave its customers the premium features (unlimited highlights, etc.) for free. I also use apps such as Evernote and Feedly, but for me, Instapaper is really simple for one purpose – reading. Where Feedly is used as my current news and blog post reading, Instapaper is my app for a random article about the best hiking spots near Asheville, North Carolina. I am slowly gathering all my paper data into Evernote, and making that my hub of, well, everything, and I find that saving an article to Evernote takes a little too much work (maybe I’m lazy). The beauty of Instapaper is I can have a large conglomerate of random articles one after the other. Sure, I could create a folder in Evernote for “Articles to Read Later” but for me, that is one too many clicks when I can click one “Save” button and it automatically saves to Instapaper.

Where the Daily Habits come into play is that I have acquired a large amount of saved articles in Instapaper (last check was at 92 UNREAD articles). Rather than binge reading at set times of the day, one of my developing routines is to now simply Read One Article From Instapaper. You might ask, “Well what happens if you run out of articles?” Two ungrammatical words for you – I won’t. For instance, yesterday I read two articles which lowered my unread count to 83, but as you can see in the past 24 hours I have add 9 more articles. I can assure you that as long as the internet, blogs, and news are around, I will be constantly filling my Instapaper app.

Do you use a similar article reading app? Have you had experience with Instapaper, Pocket, or other article collecting apps?

Comment below to let me know what you use for reading online articles

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