My read later process involves several steps. Each is a point of friction that prevents me creating new knowledge in The Quantum Garden Vault. So, to better understand what’s going on, here is an analysis of my process as I attempt to clear the backlog.

The steps an article takes

1. An article that I may want to read from a subscribed RSS feed appears in Reeder, my feed reader. Relatively few articles are saved directly from web pages.

2. From the brief excerpt shown, I will either:

3. Save the article to Wallabag unread, or

4. Read part of the article and decide I’d like to give it more attention, so I save it to Wallabag, or determine it’s not worth further consideration, or

5. Just continue on to the next article in the feed.

6. I eventually realise I have a backlog of articles in Wallabag so I do what I’m doing now and re-assess them.

7. Articles with an idea I want to capture will be archived. Some will receive inline notes and I try to use [[ ]] to link to existing concepts where I can. Many go straight through.

8. Articles with nothing worth are deleted.

9. I use the obsidian-wallabag (plugin) to ingest all “archived” articles into The Quantum Garden Vault for later processing.

10. Crickets and tumbleweeds… often nothing happens after this.

Analysis

1. This step is fine. I need to get my inspiration from somewhere. My list of RSS feeds is quite well curated and the daily volume of new articles I’d want to every process for nuggets of knowledge is easily manageable.
2. I could spend more time here reading through the article in detail but since I’m often scanning them when not in a position to think deeply, this step of qualifying articles is useful. It’s similar to the Getting Things Done Clarify step asking which articles deserve my attention.
3. Here I have the first opportunity for improvement. The end game of a Wallabag ingestion can be to save a permanent copy of a note. It’s here that I’m failing an need to change. It makes sense that I’d want to keep a permanent copy of an article because the internet is flaky enough that websites can disappear.1 Yet, if I’m honest, what’s really happening is the lazy filing of an article because I may one day need it. Instead I need the discipline to either identify a valuable idea and capture it, or recognise there is nothing there and let it go. It’s this step where self-control must be applied or I end up kicking an article into a darkened corner and later have to process it once again. Remember The two minute rule. The quality check must be, “No notes, no archival”.
4. Ingestion is ok if I’ve truly turned given each article due consideration. Like a book with notes I have the article and my Fleeting notes. A little care and attention is then required to link the idea with an existing Permanent note or to create a new Atomic note. In the situation where a note has to be referenced, I have been linking back to my copy of the note. It causes a problem because I don’t want to then republish the note on The Quantum Garden Website in case someone thinks I wrote it, but how do I have a link a reader can use. Going forward I can manage things better by linking to the original article and deleting my fleeting note copy.
5. Articles without an identified idea will no longer exist so the pressure of a backlog where I have to reprocess articles once again will go. Hopefully this will lead to all new ideas being integrated.

Conclusion

Applying the discipline to only archive notes where I have spent time identifying and noting ideas will translate into new knowledge that’s enjoyable to add to my understanding of the world. I’ll be thinking instead of procrastinating.

Now to clear that existing backlog.

Footnotes

For as long as I use Wallabag there is a scraped copy stored in the archive should I become desperate. ↩