Why (and How) You Should Create a Skimbox
A nudge against reflexive scrolling/gaming/workaholism
The idea I’m about to describe rests on two simple observations: First, almost all of us have the thought, at least on occasion: Man, I should really read more. Second, almost all of us have that app. (Or, in some cases, those apps.)
You know the one I'm talking about. It's the thing you open automatically when you have thirty seconds of dead time—the place your thumb habitually wanders the second you take out your phone. For some of us, that app is a game, like Candy Crush or NYT Crossword; for others it’s Twitter/TikTok/Instagram; or Gmail/Outlook/Slack. For me (briefly, after I’d removed social media from my phone but before I'd begun compulsively checking my email), I regret to say that it was my banking app—which, on a teacher’s salary, was…not exactly exhilarating.
In response to this, some have called for desperate measures: flip phones, digital detoxes, silent meditation retreats. To be honest, many of these fixes sound incredible—but I have a hard time imagining how I could ever make them last. So my own solution has been a less ambitious one: not trying to fight the low-level addiction that comes with modern phone ownership, but asking, Is it possible to have that app be just…reading?
After a bit of trial and error, my answer to this question is a hard yes—and I’ve even come up with a cutesy term for how to go about it: Skimbox—an email account devoted exclusively to reading.1
Why You Should Create a Skimbox (and Remove That App from Your Phone)
Let me just say that I am not against social media or gaming or productivity. What I’m against is the idea that these modes of engagement should be so accessible for almost all our waking hours, ready to seize our attention the minute our minds begin to wander. By all means, enjoy your scrolling and keep up on your emails—just offload that app from your phone unless you need it right at this moment. Ideally, limit access by logging in solely on a separate device (if you have the privilege of owning one), such as a tablet or laptop.
I should also note that this is not a pitch for reading more books (although that’s probably a good thing, too!): It’s called a skim-box for a reason. In other words, my experience with this approach has not been one of deep, immersive reverie. Rather, the goal is to create a personal feed of blogs, essays, and articles that you can peruse until one catches your eye enough to read.2
Isn’t that just, like, a newspaper? I imagine some protesting.
I mean, sure…in the same sense that your saved shows on Netflix are “just TV” or the podcasts you follow are “just radio.”
A skimbox, in other words, serves as an aggregator for reading that is personally curated by and for you. A true discovery mechanism or browsing experience, as offered by traditional print publications, can be a wonderful thing—but these are not the same as a skimbox. A skimbox is for the writers and topics you’re fascinated by, that you can never get enough of. It’s for the articles your loved ones send you that you hope to really read and engage with. You want a Reddit thread or YouTube video in there? Sure, throw ’em in! It’s your skimbox.
But I don’t like reading that much, I hear people objecting. There’s no way reading blogs and articles could ever be as addictive as TikTok.
In one sense this is true: It’s certainly easier to pull yourself away from a skimbox than from most forms of social media. The opt-out points come less frequently with reading, so the starts and ends of each new piece force a more active choice about whether to continue.
(This, it turns out, is one of the major advantages of the skimbox: Because most things you read require, at minimum, a 1-2 minute time commitment, you’ll find yourself being a bit more intentional about whether you actually want to start. In contrast, most social media apps appear to promise gratification in 30 seconds or less…but in reality, what was meant as a quick palette-cleanser easily morphs into binge.)
All that said, from personal experience, I can say that my skimbox use is absolutely as automatic and mentally stimulating as all those apps that came before it. Part of this, of course, is that my skimbox is simply the only entertainment option available to me on my phone: If you’re not able to access your work email/favorite game/Facebook (Snapchat, ShlinkedIn, etc.), you’ll settle for the next best thing—and you’ll like it, damn it. Remember, too, that everything in your skimbox is stuff you want to be there. (If curating material sounds daunting or labor-intensive to you, it’s really not; I have some thoughts on how to go about it later in this post.)
Still don’t believe a skimbox will work? Try it. See what happens when the only content readily accessible to you is a bunch of self-curated reading material. Do you find yourself running back to the app store to redownload the ones you got rid of…or do you in fact start to form a new habit?
Other Reasons
What I’ve laid out above is my grand vision for skimboxes—but there are a number of other side benefits worth mentioning as well:
It’s impossible to oversubscribe.
Most of us are constantly being bombarded with things we “should” read: eye-grabbing headlines, articles from relatives, academic papers cited in thinkpieces. Just keeping track of it all is exhausting.
The skimbox fundamentally changes your relationship to all this material. You just direct all your newsletters there and constantly email stuff to yourself, and you get to it when you get to it. If it’s urgent—star it or something? Idk.
In fact, you almost want a slightly fuller skimbox than you can handle: This gives you more options to choose from and keeps you coming back, just like a traditional newsfeed. (I do occasionally clear out the stuff at the bottom that no longer seems relevant or interesting.)
You’ll still get all the good content/information you would on social media.
Still worried about all those memes and videos you’ll miss out on? I have a few responses.
First, your friends and family will continue to send you content. In fact, they’ll send you the best of the best without you having to wade through a bunch of garbage to get it.
Second, social media does play an important role in my skimbox vision: a discovery mechanism. It is the well that will never run dry, the font of curiosities to return to when you’re starting to run low on reading material. (I do also realize TikTok isn’t very compatible with the computer, but I’m told there are ways.)
Most importantly, you’ll get a lot of the same content yourself—just via a less frenetic, less manipulative delivery system.
Here’s what I mean. On a typical social media site, you’re constantly whiplashed between different topics and stimuli designed to keep you scrolling: This sports team won the championship; that senator said something racist; holy shit—a pug learned how to skateboard!
In well-written long-form content, you get a lot of the same stuff, but the author draws connections between them that give you continuity: What was this sports team’s secret to success? Well, they were united by a common enemy—that racist senator—and they had a mantra: If a pug can learn to skateboard, we can do anything! The narrative structure makes it all more memorable, and the author will likely be linking or inserting their sources, so you’re able to see the original, too.
Ultimately, I think this a healthier, more relaxed way to enjoy content—albeit a slightly slower one. And true, I’m exaggerating a a bit: Of course, you won’t see everything in your skimbox that you would have gotten on social media.
But if you have a well-balanced reading diet, you’ll selectively get served up the best, most relevant content from other platforms. If there is something you just have to see, you’d better believe the internet will be writing about it.
No ads/sponsored content
I think this is pretty self-explanatory—and it’s great. (Unless the ads happen to be embedded in the newsletter/article. Which, to be fair, is sometimes the case, but they’re still way less intrusive than on social media.)
This benefit also makes me think about what kind of content would be incentivized if skimboxes became a more dominant mode of reading. (I know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but a boy can dream.) Instead of clickbait → more eyeballs → more ad $, you’d have a pressure for creating content that people would actually want to read about/include in articles. Which I think would be a good thing…?
Or maybe you’d just get companies paying bloggers to work in multiple references to their hot new products. (I’m not at liberty to disclose how much this company is paying me, but let’s just say there are a lot of zeros. Like a lot…Like, it’s literally just a string of zeros and nothing else.)
There could be a social element to skimboxes (?)
Another pipe dream, but here’s my pitch: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just drop some reading material on your friend’s reading stack with no pressure for them to respond on any timeline?
And then when they do write back, you have a nice little record of their thoughts right there with the article (and, if you want, your thoughts on their thoughts, etc.). This in contrast to the current system, where the article and your reactions to it are typically buried somewhere in your text messages, lost to the Cloud forever—if you even remember to respond.
Of course this would require some discretion in who you give your skimbox address to, and strict norms about what they’re used for: NO event-planning, NO work talk, NO “just following up on my last email…” allowed.
How to Do It
First, it’s important to note that you don’t have to quit that app cold turkey, or even do all the steps I’m about to lay out. You can simply create a skimbox and have it as one of several options available to you on your phone.
Here, let me again stress the importance of setting up a separate email just for reading, though. You probably already have stuff to read in your regular inbox, but it’s competing with more pressing items—and it’s probably losing. As much as I’d love it, this post probably won’t get opened before a message with the subject line, URGENT: Work Tables Covered in Dirt. (In this hypothetical, your job is tables, and I DON’T WANT ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THAT.)
Once you’ve created your skimbox, it’s time to curate. Subscribe to a shit-ton of newsletters. Constantly email yourself articles. Personally, I try to find material of a variety of lengths and styles, so that I have different reading options depending on my mood and time constraints—but it’s totally up to you. (Mark as read is also a nice signal of when you’re only halfway through something.)
How do you find things to read? First, you may realize that you already have a lot of reading material coming in that you just didn’t know what to do with before—but now you have a place to put it! Again this could be from people you know, or from traditional social media.
The best way to find new reading material, though, is to use what you already know you like. Find a writer you’re obsessed with, and figure out who they’re obsessed with. Click the links in a newsletter that seem interesting, and email those to yourself as well. In my own experience, a really interesting piece will often replace itself in my skimbox with two or three new ones.3
(To test my you-can-find-good-reading-material-about-anything theory, I selected three topics I have virtually no interest in, to see if I could find blogs and/or recent articles about them: trucks, ballet, and taxidermy. I gave myself 5-10 minutes each to find as much reading material as I could. Turns out there was a LOT.)
Finally, if you’re a freak like me, you might want to have an organizational scheme for tagging and archiving reading material. This takes a bit of extra work, but it has its perks: First, you can see at a glance what kinds of things are sitting in your skimbox. Second, it makes it easier to find something you read if you can’t remember the exact title or search terms. Third, it presents an opportunity for informal analysis of your reading habits and interests, if you’re into that kind of thing.
(In gmail, I do this using the labeling system, which serves both as a tag that is attached to the emails and a folder where they live after you archive them. You can create any categories you want, and color-code them :). Currently, my labels are: Economics, Education, Elbow, Health, News, Politics, Psychology, Technology/Productivity, and Writing/Creative. There’s not always a perfect match, but I do my best.)
I can still imagine the resistance to skimboxes, the skepticism that all of this is really worth it—is gaming/workaholism/social media really so bad? Well no, there’s nothing wrong with dithering on your phone, but the human lifespan is surprisingly short, and that time will add up if you let it. (Again, I’m not arguing that these things should be cut out completely—just put in their proper place.)
Ultimately, I don’t think you have to take all of these steps to get many of the benefits I’m arguing for, and you definitely don’t have to do them all at once. But if you want to read more, and you recognize some of the addictive tendencies I’m talking about, try believing and set up the email account.
Then, the next time you feel yourself itching to open that app, pull up your skimbox instead.
TL;DR
Make yourself a “skimbox”—an email account devoted solely to online reading—and build a habit of opening it. (It helps to take the other, more distracting, apps off your phone.)
Ultimately, a skimbox serves as an easy, sustainable intervention that can vastly improve your relationship to your phone.
Thanks to Maj for edits and suggestions.
No relation to the “young, passionate, and precise” digital marketing company in India—but you go, guys!
Substack itself recently came out with exactly this—an app that creates a feed of all the newsletters you follow. But of course this restricts you to content creators who are on a single platform, and there is no possibility of emailing material to yourself.
I also have a good friend who swears by the email service Hey, which promises the following in its promotional materials:
If you say “Yes” and screen someone in, their email lands in one of three places: important email you want to read immediately goes to The Imbox, non-urgent email like newsletters that you read occasionally go to The Feed, and things like receipts that you rarely need to read go to The Paper Trail. And it’s all up to you — you tell HEY where you want someone’s email to go.
Personally, I like the complete separation that my skimbox offers, but this also seems like a really smart system to me! (This is not spon con.)
Some of my current favorites:
Tangle—“a non-partisan politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from the right and the left on the news of the day…100% independent and ad-free, with no investors and only reader support.”
Letters from an American—a historian’s “chronicle of today’s political landscape” informed by “America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs.”
Astral Codex Ten—a personal-blog-turned-Substack that “grew out of ‘the rationalist community,’ a mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.”
Fingers—A “boozeletter” about “drinking culture, being online, and beyond.”
The Novelleist—A newsletter that started as an attempt to publish a serial novel—then turned into a wonderful general resource about (online) writing.