Throwing it out there: read with pencil in hand and make notes. That means printing out what you want to read from the web.

If you feel like making handwritten notes about a piece wouldn't be worthwhile, that's a powerful indicator that it's not worth reading and not worth your time anyway.

This is solid advice, honestly.

The pencil-in-hand approach forces active engagement. Your brain can't drift when it's hunting for things worth noting. And the "would I take notes on this?" test is a genuinely good filter. I used to do this in college. Somewhere along the way I stopped, probably when "reading" became "checking 47 tabs while pretending to work."

The printing step is where I fall off, though. There's enough friction there that I'd just... not read the thing.

Parsely is partly about reducing friction to zero—same tab, one keypress, you're in.

For me, the best system is the one I'll actually use. But you're pointing at something real. "tools that force active engagement beat passive consumption every time".

I'm tring to do this by making you deliberately advance through text. Printing and annotating does it even more forcefully. Different tools for different people, maybe different moments.