Instapaper for Processing Articles

As I start this new blog, I thought it would be helpful to outline some of the tools I intend to use to process my thoughts into daily startup posts. These tools are part of our daily routine at AccelerEyes. One of the best parts about being an entrepreneur is plugging into the great thought leadership and interesting insights of blogging entrepreneurs.

Today, I’ll discuss Instapaper. We’ve been using Instapaper for a few years now. I like it for the following reasons:

It makes me more productive. Rather than reading articles as I come across them, I can queue them up for reading later when my time has been budgeted for reading. This enables me to stay focused if at work, or stay plugged into my family life if at home. My favorite times to catch up on Instapaper reading are during vacations or quiet Sunday afternoons.
Instapaper folders make it easy to archive important articles into categories for later reference. I use a lot of folders divided into business categories such as these: Acquisition, Culture, Fundraising, Ideas (for storing ideas for new startups opportunities), Leadership, Legal, Marketing, Negotiation, Pricing, Ownership (useful archive of recommended equity splits used in startups), Product Management, Sales, Self Help (anything related to skills or productivity-enhancing material), Startup (a catchall, mostly feel good startupy stuff), Startup Resources (typically articles which contain lists of things, like “100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur”), and Team (for team building, hiring, and articles useful for my own employees needs).
The Instapaper iPad app makes reading and archiving really portable and user-friendly. Recommend the night-mode with black background for reading to sleep.
Instapaper doesn’t just store links, it actually grabs the text off the article page and stores it for you permanently. This means the information will persist, even if the article gets taken down eventually by the source.

Tricks to improving the Instapaper experience:

Add bookmarks in your browser (both PC and mobile browsers, as well as mobile Twitter apps) which automatically grab whatever article is open in your browser and sends it to your Instapaper queue.
Use IFTTT to get PDF reading queued up in Instapaper. I use the Dropbox to Instapaper IFTTT receipe. Do you know of a better way to use Instapaper on PDFs?

My complaint with Instapaper is:

There is no convenient way to highlight, markup, or store comments on the articles. I explored Evernote for this, but didn’t spend much time with it yet. Do you know of a better way to integrate highlighting and comments with Instapaper?

Tomorrow I’ll discuss how Google Reader is used to sift and discover articles worth reading.

What do you use for processing your thoughts? How do you process internet reading materials?