It is so much easier to find validation for what you already believe and think. It is much harder to be faced with a newly discovered truth that hits your core so hard that it reverberates for weeks afterwards.

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If you haven't heard of or are using Instapaper yet, then you're missing out. Massively.

I was admittedly a late adopter of Instapaper and whilst I've had an account (and used it on & off) for almost 2 years now, it is only in the last 6 months that it has really become an integral part of my daily routine.

The basic idea behind Instapaper is that most of us don't have time to interrupt what we're doing to read an article online - especially if they're a tad on the long side - and the service thus allows you to save those articles for reading them later (either via your web browser or via native iPhone / iPad apps). Since my days are normally unplanned and I'm constantly being pulled in multiple directions, Instapaper works really well for me and I spend most of my time using it before going to sleep at night, when consuming content via the iPad app (Instapaper being one of the main reasons that I love my iPad).

My current content consumption flow would be to find an interesting link via my Twitter stream and saving it for reading later on Instapaper. I also use Reeder (desktop, iPhone & iPad) to follow a bunch of cool blogs' RSS feeds and whilst the app is absolutely beautiful (in terms of reading & sharing from there), I still prefer to save articles I want to read to Instapaper instead.

There's one reason for this: Instapaper allows me to curate my own reading list.

I've never been a fan of bookmarking services (I could never fit del.icio.us into my workflow for example), even though the benefits of these are pretty obvious. Instapaper however makes it easy & obvious to curate a list of everything I've read and it's especially the list of articles that I loved which I really like. This fits into my content consumption flow, because I'm already using Instapaper as my reader, so being able to archive / like / curate my reads in a couple of seconds makes it easy to use (instead of having to use another service).

Having all of the content I've consumed in one place makes it easy to find articles that I want to reference for my own blogging or to use as an input in setting up new campaigns / implementing new business strategies. Having that available without having to do something much more than initially reading it, is even better. :)

Try Instapaper!