Pruning and Triage

Pruning means deciding what should happen to an item before you spend time reading it. You can skip it, save it for the next edition, turn it into an action, or ask for a summary first. Triage is the set of destinations that make those decisions stick until you are ready to read, act, or ship the week.

This page explains that vocabulary and the page-by-page feel of working through a book. It assumes the day-and-week model in How The Weekly Edition Works. Setup for Raindrop and OpenAI is covered in Sources and Connections.

Why pruning comes before reading

Most apps mix discovery and consumption: scroll, skim, half-read, get interrupted, lose the thread. The Weekly Edition separates the jobs:

Job	When	Outcome
Prune / triage	Spare minutes on a phone or any Pruner-friendly device	Items land in the right queue or leave your attention
Read	Later, often on a Reader device	Full articles and digests without the live feed open

You do not need to understand every article in the morning. You need an honest destination for it: skip, defer, act later, or put it in next week’s edition.

Paginated triage

Generated books open in a paginated reader. You turn pages; the app tracks how far you have gone through each book and restores that position when you return.

That matters for pruning as much as for deep reading:

• A feed booklet or Daily book has a set of pages you can finish in a sitting.
• Progress is visible as real movement through material.
• When you are done with a book, Archive removes it from the active reading set so the next session starts clean.

The point is a clear stopping point. “I reached a clear stopping point” is a better morning outcome than an open-ended scroll.

Tip

Streaks (hearts on one device, diamonds when Reader and Pruner both meet the day) reward finishing real books. See Reader and Pruner.

Maybe and TLDR

When you are unsure an article deserves a full read, or it looks long and dense, you can set it aside instead of forcing a decision in the moment.

From the URL action menu on a link (inside the reader or when opening a saved URL), the main defer options are:

Action	Raindrop collection	Typical use
Maybe	Maybes	Interesting, but not sure yet; want a short teaser summary later
TLDR	TLDRs	Want a denser summary of points and takeaways before committing

Maybe is omitted when the link is already YouTube, or when you are already inside a Maybes summary book (you are past the “maybe” stage).

Optional summaries

When OpenAI is configured under Settings → Integrations, you can generate a Maybes or TLDRs summary book. The app:

1. Loads each URL in the collection.
2. Extracts readable article text.
3. Asks the model for a title plus summary. Maybe produces a brief overview. TLDR provides a more structured summary of the main points.
4. Builds a small book of those summaries, each with a Link to article back to the original.
5. Archives the Raindrop bookmarks that went into that book so the queue does not stay full of items you already processed.

Without an OpenAI key, the collections can still hold links, but summary books will not generate until a key is configured.

Summaries help you decide whether the original deserves time. They support triage so full reading stays deliberate.

Action and Action with note

Some links are not “read later” material — they are things to do: sign up, reply, buy, file, open a ticket, finish a form.

Action	Collection	Notes
Action	Actionables	Park the URL for a task list outside pure reading
Action with note	Actionables	Same, with a short note attached when you save

These show up under the Actions tab (Raindrop collection Actionables). Work through them with the same bookmark tools you use for any Raindrop list — browser, extension, or app — not only inside The Weekly Edition.

If an article needs a login before it can be scraped cleanly, tags such as NeedsLogin can appear on action items so you can open them when you are ready to authenticate, then send them onward.

Next Edition

When you want the full piece in a future reading book, choose Next Edition. That saves the URL into the Raindrop Articles collection — the queue that becomes Short Reads and Long Reads when you close the week.

For YouTube links, the parallel label is YouTube Queue (collection YouTube), which ships to a playlist instead of an EPUB.

The Next Edition tab in the app is where you review those queues (Articles and YouTube) before shipping.

Moving an item back into reading

You can reconsider an item later. Common paths:

• Summary book (Maybe / TLDR): Open Link to article, then choose Next Edition (or Action) if the full piece is worth it.
• Weekly Short / Long Reads with a broken or incomplete article: From the article link actions, Retry can offer Next Week (back into Articles) or Needs login (into Actionables with a tag).
• Actionables that needed login: Open the bookmark, sign in, then move it into Next Edition / Articles when it is readable.
• Items already in Articles or YouTube: Review them on the Next Edition tab; remove or leave them before Ship Weekly Edition.

A Maybe does not have to stay a Maybe forever. The summary book exists so the second decision is cheaper than the first.

What a good pruning session looks like

Pruning aims for books you can finish, decisions parked in named queues, and reading that happens later when you are ready.

A pruning session should leave fewer items competing for attention and make the next reading session easier to begin.