500-544208-847__1How do you keep track of interesting stuff you read? Oliver Burkeman has developed a system for doing that, and he discusses it in his latest column in The Guardian.

After spending some time talking about how hard it is to pull all that different stuff together in the digital age, he then gets into the solution he’s found. It involves using Evernote as an overall collection mechanism and Instapaper to save interesting web articles. Then he adds an extension called Clippings.io that converts passages he highlights on his Kindle into Evernote notes, and If This Then That which does the same thing for Instapaper clippings.

And then he adds a keyword to particularly interesting clippings on Evernote, which he prints out and puts in a ring binder that he can actually read from paper. Which seems a little backward—Burkeman admits it himself—but in some cases it is simpler to have things on paper where you can more easily flip back and forth.

For myself, I think it’s an intriguing idea. I already do make some use of Instapaper and Evernote, separately, though probably not as much as I could. I used to use my Kindle’s web browser to fetch down my Instapaper highlights, before Instapaper did something that broke that capability. Maybe I should get around to trying Burkeman’s solution out. At least as far as integrating things into Evernote—I don’t have a printer, myself.

3 COMMENTS

  1. I like to select/copy/paste words, images and even video into iBooks Author or Pages (for subsequent export to ePub). Words on the web are becoming more ephemeral every day. This strategy is also better for me than a permalink because is provides the opp’ty to organize information in idiosyncratic ways. This is in contrast to eReaders that try to prevent me from copying too many words, even where there is no copyright or DRM. Yes, iBooks, I’m looking at you.

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