Pocket

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

I spend a lot of time reading and learning. Even after the demise of Google Reader, I continue to follow a number of RSS feeds. I often see links to interesting talks and articles on Twitter and in various other mailing lists and forums.

When I see a link to something interesting, I may not have time to read or watch it immediately, but I don’t want to forget about it. I could just open it in a browser tab and consume it later, but I hate having too many tabs open. Also, I can’t easily take my open tabs with me on my more portable devices.

Enter Pocket. Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket lets you save links to articles, videos, and more for later consumption. There are browser extensions, bookmarklets, and apps for mobile devices. Many other apps have Pocket integration built into them. The mobile apps download the articles to the device so that they’re available offline. This works for a lot of articles, but not all.

Now when I see something of interest, I just save it to Pocket. When I have time, I’ll open the Pocket app on my iPad and start reading or watching. If I’m heading out to an appointment where there’s no wi-fi available, I’ll make sure Pocket downloads all of my queued articles before I leave. Then when I’m sitting in the waiting room, I have plenty of reading material.

Overall, Pocket is an extremely handy tool and I highly recommend it.