My friend Sally loves that I’ve described myself as a “voracious reader.”  For some reason, the word voracious tickles her. I’ve always been a reader of books and in recent years have started following different authors’ blogs regularly.  I’m amazed by the quality of writing that exists online.  The more authors I followed, the harder it was to keep up with who was writing what, catching up on new blog posts, following different ministries and organizations, and staying current on what was happening in the world.  I experimented with different sites that helped compile and organize what I was reading online, and I have a little system in place that works for me.  It may change tomorrow, and I may have to have a different plan, but for now, this is working well for me.  WARNING: If you don’t care about organizing your online life, you can pretty much stop reading now.  I recognize that there are a lot of you who could care less about keeping track of what you read online.  I get that.  But if it matters to you and you struggle with how to manage it all, here’s what works for me.

I subscribe to a site called Feedly (www.feedly.com), which allows me to house all the blogs I follow in one place.  According to Wikipedia, “Feedly is a news aggregator application for various Web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android, also available as a cloud-based service. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others.”  For me, that just means “it keeps everything I want to read in one place.”  So I use Feedly to track and manage the blogs I follow.

I also subscribe to a service called Pocket https://www.getpocket.com which is a place to save interesting articles that I want to read later.  Often when I find something interesting on the internet, I don’t have time at that moment to read it.  That’s when I save it to Pocket. I can then read said article on my phone, tablet or laptop.  Pocket allows you to save articles, but in my opinion it’s not a great long term place to store articles.  At the point that I realized this, maybe last week, I decided to give Evernote another try.

Evernote https://www.evernote.com is a pretty familiar website.  I’m still learning how to use it and found this article really helpful in explaining what Evernote does and what it can do.  If you’re interested in learning more about Evernote, read this: http://lifehacker.com/5989980/ive-been-using-evernote-all-wrong-heres-why-its-actually-amazing

I’ll update you later as I figure out more things Evernote is capable of doing.  Like I said, I’m still learning myself. So here’s my strategy in a nutshell-

1. Track the blogs I follow in Feedly. If I want to keep something I read, I clip it to Evernote.

2. Save articles I want to read later in Pocket. Pocket serves as my “holding place” for things I want to read and file later.

3. After reading in Pocket, if it’s something I want to keep, I clip it to Evernote.

I wouldn’t consider myself a techie at all, but I am a Type A Organized type of gal. My iPhoto library is still a complete mess, and some day I long to get that cleared up too.  Patience people.  A girl can only organize and keep track of so much at a time.  Happy Friday!