Gainfully Unemployed, Part II – On the Seemingly Infinite Pocket Queue

On the seemingly infinite Pocket queue

If you have ever heard me talk about what apps I use the most, Pocket is certain to have featured heavily in those monologues conversations. For the uninitiated, Pocket allows you to save links to articles and other material from around the web to read later, digesting text into a more readable format. It’s invaluable for picking up things that I see on Twitter and in my RSS feeds (for which I use Feedly since the demise of Google Reader) and putting them all in one place without having to open each piece in the browser and read them then and there. Even better, Pocket saves these articles (and it is mostly articles that I save) to your devices, making it invaluable for commutes and trips on the Underground.

What I did not bargain for, of course, is that the cheap frugal, naïve David of last March or April bought the 8GB variant of the Nexus 4, on which the Android power user David of today has 107 apps installed. Given that I have been using Pocket since its previous incarnation as Read It Later, I have quite a backlog of material to go through. Of course, those days I followed fewer RSS feeds and fewer people on Twitter, but as my interest graph grew so did my Pocket queue. As that grew, my time to read the queue shrank considerably, as I made the decision to cut out my commute entirely and start living in an apartment a 10-minute walk away from my (now former) office. Before that, I had been travelling for an hour and a half each way on the tube each day from my parents’ house, so had plenty of time to keep on top of things.

As you can imagine, the articles piled up pretty swiftly over the year and a bit since I moved, at one point occupying more than 2GB of the 8GB system space (of which only about 5.7GB is made available anyway). To make matters worse, for some reason my phone doesn’t let me install new apps, or update existing ones, once I have about 500MB of storage left. Let me tell you: the 3.2GB of usable, non-expandable space that fit around my Pocket queue isn’t a great way to live when you’re as app-hungry as I am, and I’m constantly having to clean my music caches, delete photos (after auto-backups have taken place) and prune my app library. So, once I found myself with all of this time on my hands I decided to drop reading actual books to solve this problem.

I don’t have any records of this, but I’m certain that I started with more than 2100 items to go through and, between reading a lot of things, watching some saved videos, going through some saved photo albums and a loooong time of being trigger-happy with the bulk delete tool, I’m down to about 910 items now, which is a little bit more manageable. There’s still a whole bunch of information to be digested or destroyed though, that’s for sure.

My entire Pocket queue re-downloading at the time of writing, after much whittling over the past few weeks.

All of this relatively short-form reading has kind of killed my attention span though, since my return to books has been somewhat laboured (but let’s place some of that blame on my chosen material – more on that in a later piece). I’ll work up to it again, I’m sure.

Just remind me to get the 32GB version when the new Moto X comes out.

Note: Rather fortunately, between my writing this and the time it was published, Pocket released an app update that lets users limit the storage used by the service. Of course, the lower limit is 200MB, which is still a little high for me, but it’s a start. Thanks, guys!