It’s no understatement to say that Instapaper transformed my reading life. But I run into trouble when life gets busy because I start throwing any link that looks interesting into Instapaper. When I finally get around to reading my Instapaper backlog, I have an overwhelming list of random links to read, most of which I can’t remember why I saved in the first place. I regularly delete everything and start over.
The best way solution I know to this problem is this: Never “blind add” an article to Instapaper. If I see a headline that looks interesting, I open that article long enough to skim it and make sure it’s something I want to read. If I’m still intrigued, it goes into Instapaper. If not, I forget about it and move on. I don’t know how to measure the impact of this, but qualitatively I think it’s greatly reduced false positive interesting articles. Like a lot of things, the solution is in the human filter layer.