---
title: "Why you should use bookmarking services and \"read it later\" apps"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/why-use-bookmarks-and-read-it-later-apps
published: 2011-12-11
summary: "A read-later list is a buffer against endless surfing. Come back to it a while later and 50–90% of what you saved turns out not to matter."
---

# Why you should use bookmarking services and "read it later" apps

The usual idea of what web bookmarks are for (what the hell is the right word for them, anyway?) is saving the addresses of interesting sites you look at regularly.

I think **there's another reason** to use bookmarks: **controlling your own behavior online**.

When you come across an interesting article while working, or someone sends you a link, it's very hard to resist the urge to look at it right away and see what's so interesting there. And so work keeps sliding into the **abyss of endless surfing**.

I suffer from this badly myself, and I know the same happens to many people who work online.

Well, the remedy for this kind of distraction is precisely bookmarks. Instead of dropping what you're doing to read or watch the article that caught your eye, just toss it into a **"read later" buffer**. That buffer can be the browser's built-in tools for storing and organizing bookmarks, or online services and apps. Services like [Delicious](http://delicious.com/), popular a few years ago, have now given way to apps like [Instapaper](http://www.instapaper.com/) and [Read It Later](http://readitlaterlist.com/). Here, for example, is a clear review of the latter: "[Read It Later: read it when it suits you](http://keddr.com/2011/05/read-it-later-prochtite-kogda-udobno/)".

Personally, as I [wrote in my previous post](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/more-on-evernote), I use [Evernote](http://www.evernote.com/) for this.

Still, **the tool doesn't matter** (we're not photographers, heh).

The main thing is to understand two things:

- if you want to be less distracted at work, **don't read everything that interests you online right away**;
- a "look at it later" list has a magical property: when you come back to it after a while, no longer under the spell of *"hey, check out this cool thing!"*, it turns out that **50–90% of the saved material isn't that interesting, let alone useful**.

The principle behind such buffers is described by the same Mark Forster in his book *Do It Tomorrow*: in fact, the "do it tomorrow" principle itself is a buffer like this.

When people complain in conversation that the internet is overloaded and "weighs on the brain" with an absurd number of open tabs, this recommendation comes to mind right away. You can get rid of that pressure from the internet by managing your own information flow (an old note of mine: "[Information management](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/information-management)") and by limiting push messages ("[Two ways of getting information, and personal effectiveness](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/two-ways-of-getting-information)").