The point is the schedule
A button that sends the page you are on is a weekend project. A reading habit that runs without you is the product.
· RoutineInk
A tool that sends the page you are looking at is a weekend project, and Amazon ships one free. What is actually hard — and what nobody keeps for long — is a habit that runs without you: nine arXiv preprints, four newsletters and the three long reads you saved on Tuesday, collected into a single issue with a contents page, and delivered before you wake up.
That is the whole idea behind RoutineInk. The button is there, and it works, but the button is not the product. The schedule is.
Why a schedule beats a button
A button depends on you. It asks for a decision every time — is this worth sending? — and a decision is exactly the thing you do not have spare at eleven at night with forty tabs open. The articles you meant to read stay in the tabs, and the tabs stay open until the browser restarts.
A schedule decides once. You say which newsletters, which feeds, which searches, and what time of day; from then on the reading arrives whether or not you remembered it existed. The pile becomes an issue, the issue has a beginning and an end, and finishing it is possible in a way that finishing the internet is not.
What an issue looks like
Two digests, one account
- Morning Reader
- 06:00 every day (Europe/Berlin)
12 sources · at most 25 items · skipped if fewer than 3 are waiting - Papers
- 07:00 every weekday (America/New_York)
arXiv cs.AI and two PubMed searches · to a Kindle Scribe
Nothing waiting? The issue is skipped rather than sent empty.
Every account starts with two. Daily Read: Everything collected today, delivered each evening. Weekly Read: The week in one issue, delivered on Saturday morning. A source has one question to answer — where does this go? — and those two are the answers that make the common case a dropdown. You can add more, with any schedule, whenever the defaults stop fitting.
Your time, in your zone
You set the time once, in your own time zone, and it keeps meaning that time through the clock change. Seven in the morning is seven in the morning in March and in November; the issue is on the Kindle before the kettle boils either way.
Send now is still there
None of this removes the button. The browser extension sends the page you are on in one click, and the same menu has a second item — save for the next digest — for the pieces that can wait for the evening. Most people use both. The difference is which one they rely on.
Things worth a standing order →
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