This past Friday afternoon, I took my kids to the local public library since my eight-year-old son has been begging to go. We've been busy enough that we haven't visited as often as we should, despite it being only five minutes from our house. (Maybe this new set of borrowed books will get us back into a regular library trip cadence.)
While I was there with the kids, enjoying the air-conditioned old building and that unique "library" smell, I thought about how intentionally conducive a library is for knowledge work: researching, studying, reading, and even writing. It's a perfect spot to take yourself out of the distraction-filled physical context of home or office and into a special place meant to help you find and process information.
And that, naturally, got me thinking about my own read-later queues. In the newsletter I sent two weeks ago, I recommended using read-later tools as a way to conquer the fear-based hoarding of information in browser tabs. But on a coaching call last week, a Tidy Bytes subscriber asked the very reasonable follow-up question: "But how do you make time to go back and actually deal with all those things you put into your read-later app?"
This is, of course, a valid and important question, but also a separate one from the original topic. You'd still need to figure this out even if you kept using unwieldy browser tabs as your temporary storage mechanism. It would just be way harder to do it well. And to be honest, despite my love of these tools, I'm definitely better at filling them with new items than I am at reading and clearing them out on a regular basis.
The Reality Check
Some of you may have queues in place (like me) but no obvious place to fit a regular library visit in their calendar due to work, school, activities, childcare, or other time constraints. This is the hardest problem to solve, practically speaking, but it comes down to your priorities. How important is it to have a useful chunk of time set aside for personal digital organization? There's no right answer here; it's completely subjective. But just know that whatever choice you make will impact your ability to make progress in that area. If you gather information to deal with in the future, but then never work through it, you've let circumstances decide for you that the information you gathered really wasn't that important.
Still others may not have a library or similar place to visit. While a library might be ideal for many of us, just breaking out of your normal routine is the biggest help. A coffee shop, a bookstore, even a low-key restaurant might work. Or, if you can read suitably on your phone, what about a quiet public park bench?
Or, you might not use read-later apps at all at this point, and the idea of a regular library visit specifically to deal with these queues seems foreign or even pointless, like putting the cart before the horse. That's okay; you don't actually need something as fancy as Readwise Reader to find great benefit from dedicated, scheduled time out of the house or office specifically to work on your own data mess. Even if you're still working with browser tabs or a different system altogether, giving yourself even a little consistent and predictable time to review and clean will keep you moving in the direction I know you wanted to go when you signed up for this post.
Building the Habit
The most important step is to build something regular into your routine. If you can put a two-hour afternoon library visit on your calendar every Friday, awesome. If that's not practical, you might go with what I call a barnacle habit: attach a five-minute "read something from my queue" task to something else you're already doing regularly, whether that's using the restroom, getting ready to leave work, preparing a meal, or winding down at night before bed.
Aside from that, be sure you set a manageable target. You don't need to make it through a huge swath of your queue every time, or ever. Dealing with just one item each time you open it up is enough. As long as you can achieve some regularity, you'll build up momentum and begin to see real progress.
The Release Valve
If you're coming from a place of fear (that you'll lose important information without consuming it first), you might find your queue growing much faster than you process anything out of it. This is normal, and expected. It just means you'll spend a while calibrating your information intake with reality--tempering your optimistic view of how much time you have with the reality of your schedule.
I recommend telling yourself that any articles not read after some period of time (perhaps 30, 60, or 90 days) must be removed without further consideration. Think of it as an "informational release valve" to maintain your sanity and avoid overwhelm. This ensures that your queue doesn't grow endlessly.
Doing this, you'll also start to learn your own subconscious preferences after a while, seeing which kinds of material you habitually save but never return to. With time, you'll learn to stop saving the less important things in the first place.
And remember: you're absolutely allowed to remove something from your queue without actually reading it (or watching or listening). One of the benefits of incorporating a read-later system is that it gives you a buffer. It allows, or even forces, you to reconsider how important any particular bit of information is, since you get to see it with fresh eyes when you ultimately make time to read. I've deleted many articles from my own list this way after deciding they weren't as valuable as they seemed at first glance.
Especially if you're new at using a read-later tool, give yourself the freedom to over-use it at first until you get comfortable. The goal is to escape the risky and haphazard browser-tab follow-up method and switch to something designed for this exact purpose. Just make sure you also have that "release valve" in place to avoid endlessly piling up more work for yourself.
Your Turn
Have you set up any read-later queues yet? If so, how are you finding time to actually process them? Have you discovered any unexpected benefits or challenges with your approach? I'd love to know what's working (or not working) for you. And if you're still in browser-tab chaos mode, what's holding you back from trying a dedicated tool? Sometimes knowing the specific friction points helps me suggest workarounds you might not have considered.
One quick update on my 2025 Consistency Challenge project: I've been letting iCloud Photos Downloader run automatically in the background, keeping various photo sets backed up or synchronized. I haven't yet run the test where I move some photos between sets to see exactly what happens, but I aim to do that in the next few days. That bit of information will help decide my next steps.
Until next week, happy data-taming!