My work has me staring at a computer screen all day, and at some point I realized there are things I just can’t do on a computer anymore. Reading is one of them. Deep reading takes some preparation for me, mostly getting rid of distractions, and nothing distracts me more than a computer full of interesting things to do.

Comfort matters too, both physical (my posture, my eyes) and mental. I read better when I’m not surrounded by noise and agitation. So I got into the habit of reading in a comfortable chair or in bed, with a printed book or an e-reader with a soft backlight.

Working with computers all day also meant training my brain not to get overwhelmed by everything they offer. Over time I came up with ways to filter what I run into and save it for later. Trying to consume everything interesting you find on the internet is like drinking from a fire hose. You need some kind of workflow to stay sane and still read good stuff.

Mine has three stages: capturing, organizing, and reading.

Capturing happens when you stumble on something interesting. Usually you’re in the middle of something else, and you shouldn’t stop to read it or think hard about whether it’s any good. It should be quick and frictionless so you can get back to what you were doing.

Organizing is when you sit down and go through everything you captured. This is where you judge each piece and decide whether to keep it. If you like, you can group similar pieces into compilations to read together. Once a compilation is ready, you bind it and send it to your e-reader.

Reading is where the fun happens. A good session is immersive and away from distractions. A good chair and a good e-reader go a long way.

For a while this workflow lived in my head and in a patchwork of tools: a read-later app here, a manual EPUB conversion there. Eventually I decided to build something specifically for it. I called it Passages, and I wrote about why I built it.