How To Use Instapaper To Accelerate Your Learning
Attention is the world's scarcest commodity. Honing your attention is thus a modern-day superpower. To leverage the power of the Internet, you must be proactive, mindful, and deliberate with your attention. Instapaper helps you do just that.
If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, it's an app that enables you to save, organize, read, and resurface all forms of digital content. Instapaper is my preferred way to collect and engage with digital content on every one of my devices. The app is primarily designed for reading articles, but I use it both to read and to aggregate links of all kinds.
In this article, I explain the paradigm shift you will experience once using Instapaper and why you need it. I'll then take you through how to set up a seamless Instapaper workflow across every one of your devices. If you only want the instructions on how to set up your system, you can jump to Setting Up Your Instapaper System.
The Paradigm Shift — Why You Need to Start Using Instapaper
The amount of information on the Internet is overwhelming. Without systems in place, you'll struggle to find the best resources from which to learn. You'll constantly lose track of the content you want to read and end up spinning in circles. And worst of all, your attention will be sparse and distracted, preventing you from fully grasping anything new.
When you begin to use Instapaper, you'll experience a paradigm shift in how you consume digital content. Three major changes will take place: you'll filter the signal from the noise, you'll begin to build a centralized hub of learning materials, and you will be more focused and targeted in your digital consumption.
These three changes will allow you to fully leverage the internet to accelerate your learning.
Filtering the signal from the noise
Most digital content is designed to keep you in a state of mindless consumption. Clickbait. Life Hacks. Rabbit Holes. Sales Funnels. Their goal is for you to passively consume.
Instapaper is the filter we need to hone our digital attention. When you save content to Instapaper before consuming it, you break the chain of reactivity in which the internet wants you to remain.
With a fresh perspective, you'll find that 80% of the content you save ends up being worthless. The 20% that filters through is where the leverage lives.
Keeping track of digital content
Leveraging the resources of the Internet accelerates your learning. Essays, books, long-form, short-form, tweets, podcasts. But you need a central hub to collect this content. While some use Instapaper only for reading articles, you can use it as a link aggregator for all digital content.
Looking inside my Instapaper feed from the past week, I have five articles, two podcasts, three tweets, and two links to books on Amazon. I first see that three of these articles are useless and delete them — good thing I didn’t waste my time on them. I order both books on Amazon that I otherwise might have forgotten about. I add the two podcasts to my Spotify Podcast Playlist, and finally, I read the two articles worth reading.
I then sort anything I don't get to into one of my five folders from my Five Things That Fire You Up article. Whenever I want to read more about those topics, I'll head straight to those folders.
With this process, I am mindfully consuming digital content. I’ve kept track of several pieces to read later and filtered out the noise which would have wasted my time.
Targeted, focused consumption
When you begin to aggregate digital content across topics you are curious about, you consume with intent and focus. You make a targeted decision to dive into a particular topic instead of mindlessly scrolling Reddit.
Instapaper allows you to set up folders to sort the content you collect by topic. When you decide to dig deeper into one of those topics, you know you have a bevy of filtered resources to peruse.
Better yet, there are no distractions within the confines of the Instapaper app. Ads and pop-ups are stripped. It's you and the words on the screen, like reading a book.
Finally, Instapaper is available on every one of your devices. You can read articles on your phone, tablet, browser, and even forward emails to it. In the next section, we get each of those devices set up.
Setting Up Your Instapaper System
As the central hub for your digital content, Instapaper should be downloaded on each of your devices. Luckily, Instapaper works flawlessly across four main use cases: your phone, your tablet, your internet browser, and your email inbox.
Instapaper on your phone
Your phone is your primary content aggregator. You spend a disproportionate amount of your digital time on your phone. Having a seamless workflow for capturing and consuming digital content is crucial.
Step 1. Download Instapaper
If you haven’t downloaded the app, you can download it here. If you’re on your desktop, switch to your phone for the rest of this section.
Step 2: Set up long-press to save
Instapaper allows you to save any link you come across with just two taps. To set this up, you need to move Instapaper to your shortcuts. To do this, read through the four steps below.
- Tap and hold any hyperlink, then tap "Share."
- In the list of apps starting with AirDrop, scroll to the right and select “More.”
Click the “More" button on the right-hand side
- On that screen, tap “Edit” in the top right corner, scroll down and find Instapaper, and tap the green “+” sign to add it to your shortcuts.
Click the green “+” sign next to Instapaper to move it to the top
- Now, any time you see a link that is worth saving, simply press and hold, tap share, then tap the Instapaper icon. Voila! The link automatically saves to your Instapaper feed. You will never lose a link worth reading again. Here, get set up by clicking this link.
Step 3: Bonus pro-tip
If every time you opened your phone to scroll Instagram you instead scrolled through an article on Instapaper, you'd unlock tremendous benefits. To help foster this habit, move your Instapaper app to where your Instagram app currently lives, and move your Instagram app somewhere else. You’ll be amazed how many times you subconsciously click on this small square on your home screen.
Instapaper on your tablet
If you don’t have a tablet, you can skip this section. For me, my iPad is the device I read most of the articles I save with Instapaper. Every Sunday morning, I brew a fresh cup of coffee and crack open my Instapaper to find content to share in my newsletter Dickie’s Digest. I’m always pleasantly surprised at the rich content I have gathered over the week.
What my Instapaper looked like this Sunday morning.
Setting up Instapaper on your iPad is the same as on your iPhone. You’ll want to follow the instructions the same way to set up long-press-to-save and add the Instapaper app to your app dock.
Instapaper in your browser
Besides your phone, many of you spend a solid chunk of time inside an internet browser. It’s in this browser where you often end up spiraling down a rabbit hole from one clickbait article to the next.
Luckily, Instapaper allows you to save webpages with one click via this handy Chrome extension. Head over to your desktop and give that link a click to download it. If you don't use Chrome, Instapaper has some other options.
Once downloaded, this icon will appear next to your search bar. Clicking the icon will save your current webpage to Instapaper. Easy!
Instapaper in your email
A little-known feature of Instapaper is its email-forwarding capabilities. Instapaper generates an email address that will render in your Instapaper feed any email we forward to it.
I use this in a few ways. If someone sends me something I want to read later, I will quickly forward it to my Instapaper contact. But the best way to use it is to set up an auto-forward of your favorite newsletters straight to your Instapaper feed.
Step 1. Add contact “Instapaper” to your Gmail.
Navigate to this link and copy the listed email address. Then, head to your Google Contacts, tap "Create New Contact" and store that email address as "Instapaper." You can now quickly forward any emails worth reading later to this address.
Step 2: Set up newsletter auto-forward
There are some tremendous weekly newsletters out there. But keeping track of them in your email inbox can be difficult. Ever since I set up auto-forward to Instapaper for my favorite newsletters, my inbox stays cleaner and I never miss one of them.
First, head to your desktop Gmail. Open the newsletters or emails you want to auto-forward. Then, select the three dots in the top right-hand corner. Finally, select "Filter Messages Like This."
From there, click "Create filter" in the bottom right-hand corner.
On this screen, check "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)" and "Mark as Read." Then, select "Forward it to:" and add in your Instapaper email from the previous section.
And there you have it! Instapaper is now ready and available on every one of your devices.
Reading, Sorting, and Reviewing
With this seamless workflow in place, you can begin to engage with the rich content you collect. But this system requires a bit of maintenance to stay organized. Otherwise, it becomes a long list of content you meant to read but never did.
For me, it starts Sunday morning with a fresh cup of coffee. I crack open my Instapaper and am pleasantly reminded of the many epic pieces I captured during the week. At the same time, I recognize another chunk of articles I saved are no longer relevant or outright useless. Finally, I realize there are some things I saved that I don’t want to read right now, but will in the future. Once those have been sorted, I have a fresh line up of reads to enjoy.
This three-step process of filtering, sorting, and engaging is the bedrock of using Instapaper. After a few weeks of use, you'll begin to reap the rewards of this epic system.
If you're looking for something with plenty of links worth saving, consider subscribing to my weekly newsletter Dickie's Digest.