Categories: Articles

How To Read More (But Carry Less) When You Travel

How much reading can you get done on any given flight?

If you’re like me, you stockpile all the best articles, books and magazines for the hauls and then stuff your briefcase and carry-on with what seems to be way too many words for so few air miles. I know business travellers who get so fed up with lugging around already-read material that they actually courier the stuff back to the office.

Luckily, technology has provided us with some very beta products, including things like the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle and even the iPhone or iPod Touch, which enables you to download the free e-reader application Stanza. While the technology looks promising (I’m reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for free on my iPod Touch via Project Gutenberg), there’s still nothing like the tactile feeling we get from the printed page. Which is a big reason why we still read actual books and magazines and always will.

If anything, we’re reading more these days, not less.

It’s how we’re reading that’s changed. In a Twitter-crazed and Facebook-status-driven world, snackable content is king. But how do you aggregate and remember all of the amazing articles in magazines, free PDF e-books/white papers and other online delights you’ve noted, and then get all of them printed and ready for a short (or long) haul?

Enter Delicious (or any other online bookmarking tool).

While the tool is mostly used as a place to share your bookmarks with friends and family (think Facebook for saving and sharing information), one of the more popular features is “tagsï¿½? – words anyone can associate to a specific piece of content. Meaning, I might tag this article “enroute, inflight magazine, travel hacksï¿½? and you might tag it “mitch joel, air canada, snackable content.ï¿½? Both sets of tags are valid and both sets of tags enable anyone to find and organize this content using those tags or by adding their own. Almost all magazines and newspapers re-publish most of their articles for free online.

So, here’s the trick:

Use Delicious – I also use a tool called ReadBag – and tag all of the articles you want to read on an upcoming trip with the tag “print.ï¿½? Prior to your next flight, hop over to Delicious, search your own profile for all content with the tag “print,ï¿½? print it up, drop it into your briefcase and you’ve got tons of great stuff to read.

It’s like being the editor of your own custom-made newspaper.

And when you’re done, toss the printouts into a recycling bin. No more extra weight to carry around, and if the content was important to begin with, you’ve already got it saved and accessible online.

The above posting is my monthly column for enRoute Magazine called, Ultraportable. I cross-post it here with all of the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

– enRoute Magazine – Flyer’s Digest – June 2009.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.