Workflows in Personal and Professional Productivity

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Using Instapaper and IFTTT to automate capture of highlights

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I'm a big fan of the read it later service, Instapaper. Instapaper stores article to be read at your convenience on any device. If you subscribe to the premium service you get a bunch of perks.Two of the great premium features of Instapaper are 1.highlighting and annotation of articles and 2. The ability to save entire articles and annotations directly to [Evernote]. By hitting ‘like’ in Instapaper, the app automatically saves the full text article to Evernote.For my purposes I save liked articles to Evernote , but rely on IFTTT to handle my Instapaper notes. Each time I highlight or annotate within Instapaper, a text file with the annotated text is saved to Dropbox by this script. The saved note looks like this....Once the text note is in Dropbox, using the same Literature Devonthink Database I use for writing (as I wrote about in this entry), I index the folder that contains all the extracted highlight text files. Thus when I search in Devonthink, I find literature from saved web articles, scholarly manuscripts, and extracted highlights all in a single pass. Using the “See Also" magic hat in Devonthink I can find other relevant information very quickly.A few things I need to work on:1. Automating save to Dropbox of Instapaper comments.2. Automating full text transfer to DropBox from Evernote (for notes with highlights)I hope you find this useful.