A lot of people have asked and so I thought maybe I should write a post. I’d also be curious to hear how others are using it!
The product person in me needs to say up front - there’s probably no wrong way to use Current and I truly encourage you to experiment and find a workflow that works for you. The software is opinionated about some things but remarkably flexible in terms of other things.
First, here’s my layout (on iOS):
My strategy is to land on Saved every time I open the app, so I have that ordered first in the nav and I have it set my homescreen within settings.
My philosophy here is that I have two types of sessions:
- Reading
- Discovery
For reading, saved is almost always where I want to be. I do read things from time to time directly in the river or a current, but mostly those places are for me to “go fish” so to speak and find things to save for later.
Next on my list in the nav is “Hits” – it’s an uncreative name (surely there’s a better name, but I haven’t arrived at it) for personal friends and blogs that I absolutely read every single post. This is beyond the context that Voices provides, this is my short list of short lists that I have additional context for that an app could never hope to replicate. I frequently go to this current and promote things to saved for reading later. Soon there will be a feature that will autopromote to saved for you from any particular source. But for now this is how I do it.
The next current over is my river, which is the everything feed. I dip in here and dip out. I promote things that I want to read, or read them quickly and then leave it alone. I do this a few times a day. I might also modulate a source a bit if I see they’re posting a ton (edit velocity settings or set a limit) or have gone off the rails posting about politics or something I might mute them for a while.
A note on released vs read:
I do not release things from the river. I don’t mark things as read from the river. Those two statuses don’t mean a lot to me personally because I track the status of “have i read this thing, do i want to read this thing” by promoting things to saved. yes, the app has functionality for releasing (all above, all below, all, all read, just one, etc) but I personally do not use it. I don’t want to manage my river at all. Trust the system, things that are important to me or interesting I find and for everything else it just… goes away. That’s the promise of the app and one I strictly adhere to. Velocity is a way to manage the length of that list, the waterline is to tell me what I’ve seen before so I don’t have to look again, and the other configurations (such as limit, or pin) help me tidy up what appears here to begin with.
