Clearing your Instapaper queue is very easy:
1. Always sort by “oldest saved”
2. Always start with the oldest thing saved
3. Always delete anything that’s you’ve skipped 3 times
Your queue will be cleared in no time
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This feels very wrong to me. Clearing your queue should never be an end in itself. I’d go with Chesterton’s Fence queue management: only delete when you know why you put it there in the first place and can explain why the original subconscious motive was misguided.
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That already requires too much effort though. I think of it as demotion followed by eventual deletion. Makes deleting the default unless you can think of the rationale for saving
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I’m hoard-and-search mostly, unless it’s something for which searching online is easier due to others commonly touching it, in which case I never save in the first place
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I tried this for awhile, but I think there is value in having a little bit of a forcing function to read things not immediately attractive. Those often end up being adjacent interesting
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Counter: I’ve often read an article 10 years after I first saved it (not instapaper, PDFs). I think parts of my brain run very far ahead of conscious parts so I tend to trust it even if it means a slight drag of intention dark matter
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That’s why we started obscurePDFs subreddit. Passage of time by itself can be a wonderful filter
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Ive become comfortable with using instapaper as a repository for stuff I’ve cleared from other queues, but not a queue that needs to be managed itself (I usually get to everything after enough time but ok if not)
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