Ever since I came across Arc from watching their CEO react to MKBHD's review, I've been blown away by the product and their company, it's a breath of fresh air in a tech culture that puts data over feelings.

Arc helped me find peace online by solving my tab overload problem. No longer am I closing dozens of tabs at the end of the work day; Arc automatically tidies tabs up for me, and even better, it never creates them in the first place.

What if Arc could help us feel a similar state of zen for saving content and catching up on it?

I'd like you to picture yourself at your computer during a workday, procrastinating on Hacker News, stumbling across a NYT article, a podcast and a documentary on YouTube. You know you don't have time to get to them now, so you save them away for later, using a new feature in Arc, Save within Peek.

Fast forward to the next day and you want to come back to what you saved. Here's what that looked like in the past when you'd saved these pages as bookmarks:

Gaaaah. Information overload. Confusion. A sense of guilt for not catching up on this content. 

What would catching up on saved content look like if it was reimagined in Arc?

It might look something like Newspaper, a cosy home for your recently saved items, with clear previews to provide a leisurely browsing experience.

You can get to Newspaper whenever you need a break, it's just a swipe away from your spaces, and the sidebar is automatically hidden to get rid of distractions.

Newspaper orders your content, provides a pleasurable browsing experience, opens articles in Peek with reading mode, saves your progress, and creates a new newspaper every week with the content you've saved that week - you can browse back through previous articles for previous content.

All of this is nice. But is it solving the real problem? I don't feel like I have the time to relax into my content, and if I have a few minutes I'm straight back onto Hacker News to get the latest instant gratification instead of diving into what I've saved.

To help you catch up on your reading, there's Weekly Digest. Your newspaper, neatly wrapped and delivered to you every Saturday morning, a little treat that you can dive into over the weekend and enjoy, when you're in a coffee shop and ready to relax into what you saved over the past week.

If you enjoyed what you discovered and want to share it, Arc let's you share a link or email it to a friend, helping you and your friends discover each other's corners of the internet, highly personalized, pre-algorithm, with no work required. Just save what you find interesting over the week and look forward to weekends of discovery.

That’s as far as I got with two evenings of work. I’d love to explore the sharing angle of sharing newspapers with friends as it relates to a multiplayer internet, along with how saved content can be synced and made available offline and on the go, so our content is with us wherever we go - I'd pay for a service like that.

Thanks to @ricardgascons and Charlie for reviewing and helping to improve this article.

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When I started on this project, I thought about the mindset I wanted the user to get in. I read a physical copy of Delayed Gratification, a Slow Journalism magazine that's delivered every three months and covers news from the previous three months, and when I'm reading it I feel a sense of calm as I immerse myself in the content with a hot drink. Why can't catching up on what you stumble upon on the internet be an equally pleasurable experience, instead of feeling like another activity to check off your todo list.

There's a lot to the selection of words, and what those words convey and imply. Even saying we're "catching up" on content implies we're behind and rushing to complete the task, but I've struggled to find a better phrase. When it came to the feature, I thought about words like Saved, For later, Bookmarks, Reading list; and thinking about reading, words like Newspaper, Magazine, Periodical, Paper, Daily, Digest, and Weekly and came to mind. I liked the concept of a newspaper, sitting down in a leisurely manner for reading, magazine conjured similar images but felt a little too surface level, and neither of these captured content like audio and video but newspaper felt good enough for what I was going after here.

For designing the newspaper itself, I pulled together a few sites for inspiration, HEY Feed, NYT, and the WSJ.

I tried working in the "since you were last here" concept from the Hey Feed, but I thought it added more clutter than value so I left it out. And the concept of a weekly digest was largely inspired by HEY's Feed for enjoyable consumption of emails, and HEY World's blog which makes blogging as easy as writing an email - I imagined making blogging as easy as saving a bookmark.