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A Smarter Way to Bookmark!

The following is an issue of RealRemote, a weekly newsletter bringing meaningful and helpful tools to navigate working remotely.

https://realremote.substack.com


The Problem:

Bookmarks on your browser are a standard feature, but honestly, they can get out of hand really quickly. If I like something that I want to make I don’t forget, I take a screenshot of it and save it as a picture or add the website as an icon to my home screen. But, scrolling through my camera roll to find something is frustrating and wastes tons of time. Bookmarks either on my laptop or my phone become easily overwhelming trying to find what it was that I saved in the never-ending folders that I have from over the years.

More often than not, if I cannot find what I am looking for I'll break out my History and do a keyword search there instead. Not ideal. Not only is this time consuming, but it's also highly inefficient. I will be the first to admit that I can do better and I am willing to bet that I am not alone.

The Solution:

Enter Pocket. A way to curate all of my web surfing conveniently. It has made organizing my browsers much more enjoyable. Pocket is an app that lets you save content from anywhere on the web and organize it in a way that makes sense to you. You can save content from articles, videos, publications, and webpages. Now, whenever I want to save anything to remember for later I can just save it to Pocket.

Here below I have a list of interesting articles that I have been reading over the last couple of days that I wanted to save. The interface for Pocket is far better than scrolling through my bookmarks bar or history. Pocket has a clean and minimal UI and is very easy to use.

The main tab called "My List" shows you everything that you have saved with Pocket alongside a picture that was featured in the article. This is a nice way to browse all of your articles visually. Often I will remember a picture that was in the article, just not the title or even where it was written. Here I can do so to quickly jog my memory and find what I am looking for. You cannot get a preview of your links or images with your built-in bookmarks in the browser.... just endless lists. I love Pocket for this feature.

Sometimes you will need to clean up your Pocket because you've saved too much! In that case, you can use the Archive to clean up your List and move the articles that you no longer want to review regularly out of sight. They will remain there and are not automatically deleted, and can always be restored to the list later on if you wish.

Adding to the organization that Pocket brings, I have loved being able to tag the content that I am saving. These tags are great for collecting similar articles together and for searching for them later on. Pocket gives the option of tagging articles when they are first saved and also the ability to edit the tags at a later date. Here is an article that I saved that talks about the new MacBook Pro by The Verge. The tags here can help me find it in the future.

Upon clicking on the article you are taken to a Reader mode within Pocket that has all of the text from that article extracted from the original webpage and put into Pocket's interface. In reader mode Pocket allows you to adjust the text size as well as utilize a dark mode for those that prefer to read at nighttime with less eye strain. Within the articles, you can also highlight strings of text to call out ideas that stuck out to you for easy reference in the future. Pocket also intelligently segments out your saved content so you can easily filter for articles or videos.

Comments:

Pocket is free to use and is an amazing tool. But, some pain points exist in the free tier that is remedied with Pocket Premium. For starters the free version of Pocket still has ads. And at first, I thought that would be fine... because what site doesn't have ads? But ads feel so out of place looking at the clean simple interface that Pocket has. It was such an eyesore and honestly very distracting to look at. Pocket claims that Premium members read "2.6x" more stories than non-premium members and I believe that the presence of ads has a lot to do with that.

Pocket also has a limit on the number of highlights that you can do in the free version of the app. Three to be exact. Which I found to be very limiting. Another sore point I have with the free version is the tedious tagging of the articles once they are added to Pocket. It's great that this tagging is available for free, but if you save a lot of articles regularly, it can get old very, very quickly. The premium version of Pocket features "smart tags" that intelligently offer personalized suggestions that improve over time to automatically tag the content that you save. This, again, is a very major win for Pocket Premium.

In addition to these features, you also get Pocket's "permanent library". Permanent Library is where Pocket saves a version of the article on their servers so that you can access the article even if it is taken down from the source. This differs from the free version simply that is simply linked to the original. Besides these main features, there are minor visual adjustments you can make with the premium version that include rounder fonts, wider spacing, condensed text, among other things that can make for a move visually appealing reading experience.

For those interested, Pocket Premium is $4.99 a month. But if you buy a year upfront, Pocket gives a 25% discount down to $45 for the year.

Verdict:

Overall Pocket is a great replacement to the bookmark bar, whether you opt for the free version or Pocket Premium. I have enjoyed using it and will adopt it into my daily workflow. You can find Pocket on the iOS and Android app stores, your favorite Web browsers, Kindle Fire, and on your Mac computers.

By packaging your interesting finds on the internet and research all in a handy clean user interface, Pocket checks a lot of the right boxes. And Pocket Premium adds to its free version in meaningful and even more productive ways. I strongly encourage you to take Pocket for a spin.

Do you use Pocket? If so comment down below your experience. I would love to hear from you!

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