I think Read Later was always a fantasy. The Read Later app genre definitely sustained that fantasy in my mind far longer than it should have.

By waking up from the Read Later dream, I've made more time for reading (usually better) things. If I have time at the end of the day to read, I'd rather spend that time reading text written before Read Later was even a problem that needed solving.

Killing Read Later also means I killed the shittiest of shitty side effects of a Read Later workflow—unread counts. I permanently deleted an entire inbox. I stopped spamming myself.

Today my rule for reading internet text is essentially this: read now or not at all.

In cases where I need to act on a URL later, I use a simple OmniFocus bookmarklet to put it in my OmniFocus inbox along with other things I need to act on. In other words, reading something important is at parity with doing something important.

URLs that I can't read now and don't need to act on in the near future go into a flat Pinboard archive. An article that I may need to look at in the future isn't something I need to read later. It's something I may need to read later. It's just a piece of reference material. A simple search returns it on a whim.

Don't get me wrong. To waste time is to very much be a human being. I'll never be able to completely clockwork orange myself off of the empty calories dripping out of the "social" web. But I can get better at not putting them in a to-go box. Putting Read Later in the trash is just one way.