A couple of months ago, I wondered if micro-blogging and journaling could be combined. Something about sending off small posts feels different from crafting a whole journal entry. I’ve been journaling the classic way for years, but I often felt like I was just going through the motions because I had to. It wasn’t fun, just another task.

So I built myself a complicated solution using Apple Shortcuts and Obsidian to prototype my vision of a short-form journaling experience. Tap an icon, a text field opens, and I can quickly jot down what I’m doing or thinking about. The result was a Markdown file with timestamps and those entries. That felt surprisingly good. It was fun to open the app and quickly note what I was doing whenever I had a few seconds of downtime. Far better than doomscrolling.

Many people struggle to keep up with their read-later lists. I’ve perfected mine and—at least in that regard—I have no problems anymore.

Today, I want to share my complete read-later workflow and tools with you. It has proven itself time and again as a scalable solution that avoids the problem of an ever-growing backlog of things to read.

Here it goes: I put links to articles I want to read into my to-do list and then I read them.

That's it. That's the whole system.