Replacing weekend magazines

I used to 'make' myself a magazine of articles each week to catch up with over the weekend. I may have written about this somewhere before, either here or on Twitter (ah, here it is!, but I collect articles as I come across them, using Pocket. Most of the articles I find come via email newsletters that do their own curation, or via serendipity -- spotting things around the web, passed on by friends, etc.

Once upon a time, I read this as they came in, whenever I felt like it. I find that doesn't tend to happen any more. So I used P2K (Pocket to Kindle) to grab a random selection each week and send them over to my Kindle, which I'd then read on the weekend.

That workflow broke a couple of months back -- I think Kindle made some change to how they handle files, and for too many weeks I was getting failure emails from P2K, so I turned it off. Which meant my Pocket list turned into a tangled mess.

What I've adopted right now is more manual, but waorks out about the same. When I have the opportunity or inclination to read some articles (still usually at weekends), I'll try to winnow the list down to approximately the 20% of them that seem most interesting to me. Then I'll read those.

This Pareto approaches works in so many contexts. It's rarely perfect, but it's such a good, simple heuristic that, when applied, gets you to think about what's really important. In the case of articles, it sharpens for me why I actually want to read a particular thing, which is an important question to ask.