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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

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Instapaper 4: Deciding to Read

Instapaper 4 Icon

Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone

The lede here is that my pal, Marco, has just released the stellar new 4.0 version of his Instapaper suite.

This is fantastic news, and–as if you needed one more of Marco’s beta testers to say so–I do sincerely hope you’ll mark the occasion (and support his hard work) by purchasing the Instapaper iOS app(s). I promise you’ll be treating yourself to a massive update to an already excellent product.

Now, it’s fortunate and appropriate that you’ll be hearing this advice at length from a lot of people this week. Because, if it’s not already obvious, Marco’s little app (and its associated services) enjoys a rabid fanbase of sundry paragraph cultists who are as eager as I am to spread the word; and, yes, we do want you to join the Reading Nerd cult.

But, I also want to mark the occasion by adding a few thoughts on exactly what Instapaper has done, and continues to do, for me. (As you may already know, I’m a big Marco fan.)

Thing is, I want to tell you how Marco has made a magical machine for people who have decided to read.

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Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics

Smiles!People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here's my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I'm not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that's how you know they're personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

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