Study Finds People Who Say 'I'll Read That Later' Are Lying to Themselves

A longitudinal study from Stanford's Department of Behavioral Psychology has finally quantified what the little voice in your head already knew: you are never going to read that article you saved. The research, which tracked the digital habits of 2,000 participants over 18 months, found that the average person maintains a "read later" backlog of 247 articles, 38 podcast episodes, and 12 YouTube videos labeled "important." The completion rate across all categories was 3.1%, with the remaining 96.9% serving primarily as "aspirational content" — things people save not because they intend to consume them, but because saving them provides a brief neurological reward similar to the feeling of having already done something productive. The study also found that the probability of reading a saved article decreases by 14% for every day it remains unread, reaching effectively zero after two weeks. Lead researcher Dr. Hana Okafor noted that the findings are "consistent with what we know about human optimism bias," then added, with a slight smile, that the paper itself would probably end up in several thousand people's read-later queues.