I like to read and learn. Education and learning new things are really baked into my DNA. When I’m relaxed and able to do anything I would like to do, you’ll likely find me reading. With the Internet, there are now more options for getting a free education, too.
Medium and Pocket
You can get a steady stream of worthwhile articles to read, and on just about any topic, by setting up an email feed from Medium and Pocket. Both of these sources will provide curated lists to you on just about any topic.
Medium
While Medium isn’t free – it requires a subscription of $5/month if you go over about three articles a month in your reading appetite – I’ve found the fee to be more than paid for by the quality of the articles. The selection delivered to your inbox is curated by their staff with some addition listings based on the authors you’ve liked in the past. Medium articles can get repetitive in some topic areas, but the writing is by and large high caliber each time.
Pocket operates differently than Medium for how it builds its curated list. Pocket does not have any of its own content as the company’s primary purpose is not as a content provider. Rather, Pocket is a tool for storing what you would like to read later — sort of a digital file cabinet.
The list you get from Pocket is for the articles other people are reading all over the Internet. Nearly all articles are without a pay wall. Pocket knows what to provide you based on tags added to the articles by readers themselves. By using Pocket’s list, you are essentially crowd sourcing suggestions for what’s good to read this week.
Using these two sources for digital content provides a quick and easy way of educating yourself by getting daily insights and readings on topics of your choice.
Pro Tip: Use Evernote Web Clipper!
I pick and choose which articles in the daily emails are ones I think are worth reading, and also worth keeping on hand. Not everything strikes a chord with me. When I do find something, I use Evernote‘s Web Clipper tool to save the article to a notebook called “Resource Library” in my Evernote account. I tag the articles as I do this and Evernote does a good job of stripping away the excess fluff and any advertisements from these webpages. This lets me go back and read these articles, sorting them by a tag for topic review, or share articles easily with clients and friends.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash