Can We Get a Sort by Read Length Feature on Medium?

I’m tired of scrolling through endless drafts to find what I need.

Benjamin Davis

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3 min read

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Jun 24

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If you go to your stories on Medium there are only four ways to filter them. Draft, Published, Responses, and Unlisted.

Cool, no problems there. But there is no ‘sort by’ option. It lists out all of your stories in the order you’ve worked on them. This is workable if you have 10–20 drafts. I have 588. Why? Because I’m a procrastinating lazy piece of shit who can’t just finish one thing at a time? Well, yes.

But also, I tend to half-write pieces constantly to return to later. Or I jot down an idea to write an article about and then need to put it somewhere. If I’m planning to put it on Medium, then the logical place to keep the draft is on Medium. But it totally sucks here for any sort of sorting/categorization.

I only ask because I don’t think it would be too hard to implement. The read length is already being cataloged and shown on the title card for each draft. So the information is available. This would turn Medium drafts into a place where you can store and sift through your writing before publishing (rather than having to work on a piece via Google Docs and then copy-paste over when it’s time to publish).

The title card even has a word-count note. You could get even more detailed with it and sort by word count instead. If the data is there, and already being shown, it’s just about implementing the feature.

I know this is a small thing, but it’s often the small things that make all of the difference in usability. If I’m not sure what I want to write about today, I’ll get more traction out of my 3-minute-so-far reads than my one-minute reads. I don’t know. Maybe I am the only one who does this. A half-complete article is more appealing for me to work on than a few sentences of an idea.

Right now, the “sort by last edited” only works for people who have one style of strategy for publishing. Finish. Publish. Repeat. Good for those people and their working brains. But adding a few sort options doesn’t impact those folks, it just makes it more convenient for others who have a different style.

Maybe I am missing something. I work with a database daily for my job and applying new sort options is pretty simple to implement.

And, not to be greedy, but while we’re here, why not also allow for sorting by tag? Maybe I want to schedule when I publish on different topics. Or maybe I see a publication about a topic and think, “I’ve got something for them!” I’d be able to simply sort by tags and there it would be in my drafts. Just an idea.

I’ve been on Medium for five years and while a lot of things have changed, for better or worse, the draft catalog for writers has stayed the same. This might be a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ sort of thing. And I guess it ain’t broke. I am. Having this feature, I think, would make writers’ lives a bit easier.