Save Articles To Read Later

An excellent principle to live by is to do any task which requires less than 5 minutes to do it immediately, and you can schedule other tasks. But it is essential to do them eventually, or you would end up with a pile of responsibilities and a lot of stress.

Do you intend to read a lot and then push them to the end of day, only to never read – then you can benefit by simple tweaks in your life.

Dedicate time, prioritize things, and be strong in your discipline – these three things can help you get more out of your life.

On Reading

Traveling is a delightful experience where you can meet people from different cultures, eat food which looks different and is tasty, and experience the landscape of nature which soaks you in.

But as it is said, the journey is as important as the destination – if you are traveling, you should try to do it with people whom you love – friends, family, and colleagues. As such, you are bound to experience a healthy conversation, funny banters, and memories which will stay for a lifetime.

And if you are traveling alone, often you would take up your phone and start listening to songs or play a game on the phone.

Sure, those are things which you can do to pass the time – a better thing you can do is read a book, magazine or newspaper. Reading is a beautiful, simple, yet profound thing you can do with your time.

It challenges you, teaches you, and makes you smarter at the end of it. Also, the stories connect, and you gain experience, lessons, and insights which the author has accumulated over her life years. That’s a sweet bargain for the price of a cup of coffee.

Web links and Books

This habit of reading books made you try out new books in the making because there are a little risk and a potential fortune as a reward.

So now when you find yourself with free time, you read some articles on the web written by people whom you admire and sometimes from unknown people. So you subscribe to them – now whenever they write something, they notify you with an email.

Every day, your routine is now to check the email, click on all the emails and read them, which are a good practice to start your day with a positive vibe.

But sometimes when you are bombarded with many things to do, you bookmark those articles and go about doing something else. Of course, you will get to them later, but you don’t. And now there is a pile of articles which you have bookmarked and not read. At this point, the list is so big that you would need an hour or two to get it all completed.

Somehow you don’t get the time to have another look at them. Something or other thing comes in the way. And the cycle continues – new emails coming in every day.

Procrastination

One of the things which are responsible for your decline in reading is procrastination. Often when you have some time, you procrastinate about ten things you need to do and get only a handful of them done.

There is too much planning going on and fewer things getting done. Also, sometimes you don’t remember you need to get back to reading.

So at the end of the day when you find yourself with some time, you pick up the phone and start watching some cat videos.

Time passes by, and you click on another video and then one more – pushing yourself to lose time because the video is entertaining. At one point, you lose track of time and everything else, you are mindlessly surfing the videos – some good, some entertaining but most of no use.

The moment you realize you have wasted so much time which could be used to read something or work on your project or do some exercise – it is too late.

And now you need to go on to the next thing on the list, the articles which you have bookmarked have lost in the deeper sea from which it has become difficult to retrieve them.

Dedicated Time

One way to solve this is to have your life set to prioritization. You have to decide which three things are essential to you. If reading isn’t that important, then it’s okay if you read some articles and push others into darkness forever.

But if reading has a place in your life which decides your character, projects, and ambition, then you need to have a dedicated time for it.

Open up your calendar and block at least an hour every day or 3 hours every week. That way you won’t have any other appointments at that time.

For example, block afternoon on Thursday for doing nothing except reading. So open up all the bookmarked links, disconnect the internet and take your laptop to the park or some peaceful place. And get lost into reading, grasping, and challenging your viewpoints.

All comes down to habit, discipline, and ability to say no to someone. Once you have scheduled your calendar, say no to anyone if they require your blocked time for reading. This way, you will ensure nothing comes in between you and your peaceful reading time. When the time comes, push to utilize the whole time to reading alone, this will built a habit of continuous reading. And this routine will help you be more disciplined in other blocked time too for various activities.

If painting, writing code or dancing is more important to you than reading, then you can use the same approach and mentality to bring out the best in you by investing a chunk of your time in studying them.