Pocket is one of my iOS apps that I don’t think I could do without. In the age of the Internet and mobile connectivity, we’re bombarded with information and often we come across things that we might want to read or buy, but just not right this second. With so much going on, if we don’t do something with it, we’ll probably forget in 30 seconds.
Enter Pocket.
For the uninitiated, Pocket is fairly simple in principle: it’s a (free) service that allows you to save articles and information for consumption at a later time. Its integration and simplicity of use is what makes it so seamless and essential to my workflow online.
There’s two components to Pocket: saving items to your account and then consuming them. For me, I mainly use Pocket’s iOS app and their Chrome extension (there are other official apps and tools for other browsers and devices).
Saving items to Pocket
Any time I’m using my iPhone and come across something of interest in Tweetbot, BBC News or Chrome for example, I can use the universal sharing extension to send the item to Pocket in a couple of clicks and then move on knowing that I’ll be able to read it later. Or if I’m using Chrome on my desktop or Macbook, a quick click on the extension button, or right-click on a link saves the item without fanfare – just a quick acknowledgement that it rests safely with Pocket.
Reading in Pocket
Then whenever I have 10 minutes to sit down and read, I open up Pocket (using either my iPhone app or OS X app) and catch up on the things I’ve saved.
One of the nice things about reading in Pocket is that it removes the clutter from the page and extracts just the content itself so that you can read without distraction from ads, navigation and popups.
Also, thanks to integrations with services like Feedly and If This Then That, you can systematically add new content from sites that you want to see everything from to your account.
Pocket is an amazing service that is so simple but does an excellent job of getting our own distractions out of our way so that we can read what interests us the most at a time when it is convenient to do so.
