This is partly a new year’s resolution (although I started in December so 🤷). I decided I wanted to make my mindless scrolling on my phone a little more useful. So now when I catch myself scrolling I ask myself the following:

Do I have the energy to read at all?

I often find I have 5 or 10 minutes where I don’t really have the energy to invest in properly reading something. This is the time I want to get a little more use from. So if the answer to the question above was No then I scroll various news sources looking for things that are interesting (this is a combination of twitter, rss, hackernews, reddit and a few other aggregators). Anything I find gets added to my instapaper (for a while it was just a trello list). This is relatively easy to do even if I don’t have the energy or time.

Do I have the time/interest to read a book?

If the answer is yes then I switch to the kindle app on my phone and start reading. I’ve made sure I’ve got a couple of interesting books ready.

Do I have enough time/energy to read “something”?

I can now just pick something from my instapaper. It estimates reading time, so I can pick something that fits the time I have.

Has this worked?

So far? Subjectively? Yes. I’ve spent more time reading interesting articles. I’ve also read a decent amount of a book too. Will this keep up and become a habit? Will I forget? I don’t know.