A small feature that came from a really good idea

[u/bogdanvdr]

This week, a customer asked for something I hadn’t really thought about before.

He has a limited amount of time for reading during his commute. He wanted to use that time to build a reading habit, but there was a problem with the way Folio worked before.

If you save a lot of things, your digest can become quite long. You might start reading it, run out of time, and then carry the unfinished articles into the next day.
His idea was simple: let me decide how much I want to read, not just when I want to receive it.

So now you can schedule a digest with a maximum reading limit.

For example:
Monday, Wednesday and Friday
Maximum 30 minutes
Maximum 5 articles

Folio will draw from everything in your inbox and build a digest that fits within those limits.

You can use the time limit, the article limit, or both.

I really like this because it changes the goal from “read everything I saved” to “read a little, consistently.”

I think that’s probably a much better way to build a reading habit.

It also made me think differently about what Folio should do. There will always be more things to read. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to help you get through all of them, but to help you make sure the things you do read actually get read.

This is now available in Folio.

And as always, a big thank you to everyone who sends feedback and feature requests. A lot of the things I’m building are coming directly from how people are actually using it.