Automate everything: following and reading literature

I’m a big fan of saving time by automation. Any job you have to do repeatedly which doesn’t require your brain would be a job to be automated. Below is how I organize my workflow and the tools which I use to stay up-to-date with the scientific literature and to organize my reading.

I use Inoreader to follow RSS feeds from certain journals and preprints, a lot of blogs, newsletters, some important Twitter accounts, and search terms in PubMed. Every day I go through about 150 new items to search for interesting things, and as a ‘reward’ also things like The Onion and quite some webcomics are followed at the end of the list. The pleasant part about using a content collector like this is that I don’t get any notifications at all for new items which could be of interest, and I can quickly browse through all channels whenever I have the time.

I mark pages and papers which are worth reading by sending them to Pocket. It has probably more useful features, but I mainly like it because it has a Firefox/Chrome extension so I can save a page with a single click and move on. It is also integrated with Inoreader and Twitter. In the next step If This Then That (IFTTT) is used to create a new task in my Todoist with the label ‘read’, but without a due date. Todoist basically makes sure that my personal and professional life doesn’t fall apart and compensates for the poorly performing bunch of neurons which collectively claims it forms my brain.

Every working day (except Friday because Friday is for coding) there is a recurrent Todoist task to read (at least) one paper. To organize my papers to read and citations while writing I use Paperpile. It has a feature to search for PDFs, which are then saved in Google Drive. If a free PDF is not available you should absolutely not use the telegram bot of sci-hub, because that’s illegal and very easy, and it also gets around blocked pages by your internet provider. I like reading on my Remarkable (which is also great for taking notes during meetings, you know, when we had physical meetings before the pandemic). To sync papers I mark with a star in Paperpile to the cloud system of Remarkable I found a convenient script on Reddit (available on GitHub), which is run daily. After reading a paper, all that is left is to unstar it and mark the Todoist task as done. Unfortunately not every step of this is entirely automated, but close enough.

How is your workflow? Which are your favorite automations and integrations to make scientific life easier?