Walden Pond - on indefinite hiatus! Don’t pay for a subscription.
A little paper zine, full of articles for you to read in your cabin.
(Or, on the beach, on a plane, a train, or your sofa)
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Walden Pond is a little paper zine that comes once a month in the mail ✉. It’s full of a selection of the articles you’ve saved to Pocket, so you know that you’re interested in everything inside. Each issue has over an hour of reading, the battery will never run out, it’s clear in bright sunlight 😎 and has a low-latency pen interface (or pencil) 📝.
What people think
When I cracked open my first edition I felt like it had been grown in a lab just for me. The perfect digital detox.
Jenn, librarian.
I'm about to get my third curated edition of Walden Pond and I'm really looking forward to receiving it. Reading online articles in a physical book has been wonderfully relaxing, especially over a cup of coffee or breakfast in the morning. This service has not only helped me to reduce my screen time, it's been a welcome reminder that there are articles, ideas, and stories "past me" wanted to read, but didn't have time to do so. Now I can incorporate my reading into self-care time and really enjoy exploring topics that piqued my interest and keep me inspired.
Angela, Learning Designer.
I read on a screen all day for work, so taking time to read on a physical zine custom curated by me makes my leisure reading really enjoyable. Great quality printing and integrates really well with my pocket.
Jülz, engineer.
With Walden Pond, I no longer need to email articles to myself to (never) read later. Now I get a surprise pick of articles I've saved to pocket. It comes in a perfectly sized paper format - which is just right for squeezing in a bit of reading whenever and wherever I have time.
Ronie, PhD student.
Walden Pond is one of those genius ideas because it is so simple - why hasn't anyone thought of this before? For me, it straddles a difficult dichotomy between wanting to disconnect from digital media and desiring to stay in touch, connected and up to date. I find reading on paper helps me to assimilate information better and being able to annotate helps formulate my ideas. Oh and it's beautiful, too!
Heather, teacher.
I take mine to a cafe, and leave my phone at home. If I take the phone it takes two hours to read, without the phone it takes an hour. If I try reading long articles on the Pocket app, I don't know how long it would take, I always get distracted! Ben, developer.
Walden Pond removes all distractions and relieves my FOMO by delivering exactly what I want to read... when I'll actually read it. I'm obsessed.
Derek.
I've been trying to reduce my screen time and this is a great way to do that while still keeping up with things I know I want to read. It's like a personalized magazine so it's easy to pick up and jump into an article quickly without having to search. The physical production quality is also very well done.
Ryan, learner.Pricing
You’ll get a monthly edition that fits how much you read. That’s the price, no extra postage costs or mystery fees.
Printed
1 hour
2 hours
4 hours
1 hour ⏳📖 $10
2 hours ⏳⏳📖 $12
4 hours ⏳⏳⏳⏳📖 $14
Shipping
We can ship to everywhere except Antarctica. The price above includes shipping.
We can’t take payments from Cuba, Christmas Island, Heard & McDonald Islands, Iran, North Korea, Norfolk Island, Sudan or Syria, but in theory we can ship there. (We haven’t tried yet.)
What do I get, and when? 
At the start of each month you get a printed zine 152×228mm (6×9in) in the post.
Here’s an example PDF of a 4 hour edition. Yours will have your articles in it, but the layout will be pretty similar.
You can make edits up until the 17th that will show up in the next month’s edition.
Why is it called “Walden Pond”?
When it comes to unplugging and digital detoxes, some of the more loony self-help gurus preach an all-or-nothing doctrine that’s not that helpful if you live in the real* world. (*Whatever that actually means.)
Henry Thoreau wrote Walden while shacked up in a cabin by Walden Pond (the lake). He was making a show of being far from the madding crowd, but was only 2 miles away from town, and would get his mum to do his laundry. This isn’t taking a swipe at Thoreau for being disingenuous, I think it was smart. He was managing his attention, not living in a state of nature, and not living in a state of perpetual hyperstimulation.
Walden Pond the zine is named after the technique, not the place. (See: Against Waldenponding.)
What is 
?
Pocket is a service that lets you save articles to read later. I’ve been using it for about 10 years now. It’s free for a normal account, which covers almost everything you need. It’s run by Mozilla, the Firefox people, so you know they are serious about privacy.
You need a Pocket account to use Walden Pond. At the risk of stating the obvious, you also need to save at least an hour’s worth of reading too. (Or however long your edition is going to be!)
I wrote about how I use Pocket to keep me sane. It’s bit old now, but most of it still applies (not the bit about Google+, obvs!).
The quick story
There’s a lot of good content online, but I can’t martial my attention to engage with it properly. My limit is about 4 minutes before a notification breaks my focus, or I get sucked into checking my phone. Maybe you’re a bit like me? The idea here is that you can just save articles to Pocket, and then once a month you’ll get a little magazine with over an hour of reading.
The long story
In 2018 Venkatesh Rao wrote a piece in his newsletter called Against Waldenponding.
“There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you.”
Which is exactly what Walden Pond is for; it lets you manage your attention yourself. It keeps you plugged into the “Giant Social Computer in the Cloud” but in a way that allows you to manage the flow of disruptions across your brain-cloud barrier.
It’s fashionable (and obvious in hindsight) to work out what part of the day you work in what ways, and to do the work that fits that work style best. Richard Hamming scheduled “Great Thoughts Time” on Friday afternoons. Lots of people try to avoid meetings in the mornings. Whatever you need to do to manage your connection to the world is the right thing to do, as long as it optimises for what you want out of life.
In Deep work Cal Newport suggests that you should attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
, which is pretty hard to do if you’re getting group WhatsApp messages about nothing in particular. Even the buzz of the phone causes a burning FOMO that eventually forces me to look at it and break my attention.
Carbon Removal
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Want to know more?
If you want to know even more, take a look at these articles or send us an email and ask us anything you like!