A Faster Way to Custom Reading Plans
The new Custom Reading Plans feature is a huge bonus addition to Logos, in my opinion. It finally allows us easier access to our resources, especially those of a monograph nature.
But the setup for a custom plan can be slightly less than intuitive. I found the method below to be a bit easier than the one built in to the tool.
1. First, create a clippings document. (Open the Documents menu, and click on Clippings.)
2. Name your new Clippings document by clicking on the pencil icon and typing the title. Call it something you can associate with your reading plan. For this example, I'm making a plan to read R. C. Sproul's Crucial Questions booklet called, Are These The Last Days?, so that's what I'll call my clippings doc.
3. Open the resource(s) you want to include in the plan from your library. Highlight them according to how you want them to show up in your plan. For the first reading, highlight what you want to read that session. Right-click and choose Add a clipping to "your title". Now highlight the second reading, right-click, and add that to the clippings document. Keep doing this, in the order you want to read and the amount you want in each session. If you don't know for sure what all you'll want to add, you can always re-open this part and edit it later.
4. Once the clippings document is finished, go to your Home page and click on the Add in the Today's Readings section to add a reading plan.
5. When the plan popup pops up, click Custom Reading Plan.
6. In the new popup, click the Add dropdown and choose ...a Clippings document.
7. When you click ...a Clippings document, a sidebar will pop up listing your clippings docs. Choose the one you created above.
8. Your readings will appear in the plan. If you want to start on a day other than today, choose that option. If you want to read with a Faithlife group, choose that option as well. Then click Done.
Your custom plan should now appear in your home page sidebar.
One of the benefits of using this method instead of creating directly from the custom plan dialog box is, you'll have a clippings doc with all your readings in it for use in other places in Logos in case you ever need it.
I'm sure there are other good ways to create these plans, but this method was the most intuitive to me, and allows me to browse and add sections to clippings docs that I can later come back and read as a part of a plan. This parallels the 'Read It Later' app for online reading. And this method is especially useful for reading journals, since there are articles you want to add and articles you want to skip in each journal.
HTH.
Eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river.
Comments
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Good method ... and explanation.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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I highly dislike the way reading plans are in L6 so I will try this technique. Thanks0
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Great idea Doc. I will have to try that.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Good tip, thanks.
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Thanks for the idea.
I was crafting a devotional for Advent and was using the Custom Reading Plan tool. This looks faster. I was creating multiple readings from various resources for each day. Just a heads up what the Clipping Reading plan does is to assign each clipping to a day. My recourse would be to have a couple of different clipping files for Advent.
Now if they would just get the Custom Reading Plans down into the mobile platform I would be a very happy camper. That is where I do most of my reading of books.
I think what I might do is to use the Reftags and create a document with links and use that in my Goodreader app as a driver to the resources.
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Bruce Roth said:
what the Clipping Reading plan does is to assign each clipping to a day.
Bruce,
As best I can tell, each entry in the Clippings file (i.e., each individual clipping) gets its own day. That is one limitation that my method has that you can defeat using the custom tool.
Eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river.
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Nice hack! I wasn't aware you could create a custom reading plan from a clippings document. Thanks for this description. Very well done, and well illustrated. You could have a future as a Logos wiki editor, or maybe even an MVP.
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