The Year of Simplify: Put It In My Pocket (App)
/When I was a kid, I read voraciously. I would read EVERYTHING. I especially loved my serial reads - Baby Sitters Club, Boxcar Kids Nancy Drew have since been followed by Twilight & Harry Potter. I also had a soft spot in my heart for newspapers big and small.
I learned early on in life that reading was both the connection to the world at large and an escape from it.
When I got older, most of my reading was for school (as most of us experience), and I actually panicked when I graduated from college.
What would I read now? Would my brain turn to mush now that I didn't have a wealth of books readily available (and sometimes forced) upon me?
My brief freakout led to a promise I made to myself never to be short of things to read. In this year of simplifying, it's something I've made a priority to do more of. Reading - actual reading, of books and long articles and such - often loses out to the ease of social media in the battle for my attention. For the most part, the endless stream on social media is more mental junk food than reading anything thought-provoking. It's not all bad, but it's definitely a double-edged sword. I get all of my news and information from social media nowadays. Thanks to Pocket, I can read all the things I want to, when I want to!
Pocket is a mobile, web and desktop-friendly app that's changed my life. Much like Unroll.me has done for my email, Pocket lets me save the stuff I want to read in one pretty place I can come to when I have time. Tags and favorites make the organization freak in me happy. It integrates well with my other favorite apps, like Twitter, Buffer and IFTTT - so I can save articles, read them, then share them back out with ease.
I just figured out how to get the number of articles I have saved to show up on my iOS devices, and it was over 3200! I have a lot of work to do - and now that I have a number to work with, I can set daily goals for number of articles to read. Sometimes I save things and later I'm like, "WTF is this?" - so there's been a lot of weeding out too.
For the times when I don't feel like diving into the books I'm reading, or when I want to read online but not social media, Pocket's my game changer for having valuable reads at my disposal.
