The amount of information available on the internet is mind-boggling and there are a lot of articles begging for our attention. And every day there are new ones added that are interesting to us in one way or another.

The amount of stuff to read is getting bigger and bigger every day. Delivered to us through Facebook, Twitter, several RSS Feeds or by “manual” browsing. Since time is limited and often when we come across an interesting piece we can’t consume it right away, so we want to keep them for later. Probably the two most popular “Read It Later” services are Instapaper and Pocket.

While their premise sounds great they quickly can become more like a graveyard for unread articles. Articles added for later consumption quickly get buried by newer ones without us even looking at them.

“I will read that on my holidays”.

It never happens.

Since the sheer knowledge of the huge amount of unread articles waiting for me can become a bit uncomfortable I came up with a simple rule: Delete them.

The idea is that if an article hasn’t been interesting enough for me to read it within 30 days, it probably never will be. I am deleting everything older than 30 days every once in a while. This keeps the backlog tidy and adds the urge that I really have to make time for those articles that I deem interesting before they “time out”.

And because a rule is only useful if it is kept, I have started working on a small App (for OS X firstly) to help me with deleting those old articles from Pocket, so I can cheat myself out of it easily by simply forgetting to do the cleanup.

Follow me on Twitter if you are also interested. I should have a first version available soonish.