The List of Unread Articles

Everyone has it: twenty tabs open, a bookmarks folder, the chat where you send links to yourself. The list keeps growing and the "later" never comes.

The reason is not laziness. A saved article doesn’t ask for time: it asks for the one thing you don’t have, which is a block of time with your eyes and mind free at the same time. You save it precisely because you don’t have that at the moment, and you continue not to have it, because in almost no one’s day does that moment exist.

An article enters the list just like it would enter any other list: from the share sheet in Safari, or by pasting the link — the same gesture you would use to send it to a friend, with yourself as the recipient.

Listening shifts the problem to a different category. The piece stops asking for your eyes, and thus stops competing with work: it begins to compete with the minutes when your eyes are already occupied and your mind is not. While you prepare dinner or hang out the laundry, at the gym, at the supermarket checkout. These are snippets that, taken one by one, seem insignificant, and that over the course of a week become the only place where that list can truly be consumed.

The practical way to use them, however, is not to listen to everything: it’s almost the opposite. Once a week, look at the list and throw away what you saved out of obligation — the piece that seemed right to read, the one saved to avoid feeling superficial. In the same sweep, also remove the pieces that cannot be listened to by design: the article with the table, the one with the graphs, the technical text you would want to highlight. Those require your eyes, and listening to them is a worse way of reading them. Six articles you will listen to are worth more than sixty you won’t.

Second tip, counterintuitive: start with the oldest saved article, not the most recent. You still remember the latest one and it will be there tomorrow; the one from three months ago is the real test. If you’re no longer interested, deleting it is a liberation. If you’re still interested, you’ve just recovered the thing you were afraid of losing the moment you saved it.

If it’s working, you can’t tell by how long you’ve been listening. You can tell by one thing only: the list is getting shorter.