But the bookmarks are starting to pile up, full of cool and interesting things I can leverage, yet I don't leverage them. They sit there looking pretty without action taken on them.
Is this a form of procrastination? I promise to myself I will revisit these bookmarks, but they linger there, unused, like a treasure chest that is unclaimed.
If you bookmark like myself, how frequently do you act upon these links? Do you make full use of bookmarking services, or maybe 10% of the links stored there are actionable?
Here's what I have started doing:
* Don't bookmark, add to a relevant Notion doc instead.
An exception is for tools or pages I definitely will visit again soon because I either use them all the time or I'm in the middle of a project that requires them. In this case they go in the bookmarks bar and nowhere else. (e.g. webmail link)
* Keep a minimal number of tabs open, so that the information keeps flowing through my system and I don't have to go on tab closing binges
* Determine what I'm actually going to use the bookmark for as I'm preparing to either bookmark it or just close it.
Will I try this thing out? Make a YouTube video about it? Read it? Just want to re-evaluate it later?
This determines what Notion doc it goes into so I can do minimal sorting of bookmarks later and just get to using them.
If the answer is "idk, just kinda want to hold onto this", I skip it and leave it to the void.
You won’t. I recognise my previous usage in your words.
Here’s my current usage. Pinboard bookmarks have two states: read or unread.
My read ones all have at least one tag, and usually no more than that. I have about 20 tags and under 200 bookmarks. Once a year or so I do a general cleanup. If I can’t realistically picture a scenario in the next two years where I’ll need a bookmark and remember it exists, I delete it. Be honest. The goal is to keep them to a minimum.
My unread bookmarks I check through the Pinboard-provided RSS feed. That consolidates my “inbox of content” to the same app, making it so I only have one number to manage. Keep that number low. Ruthlessly. Once it gets larger than what you can manage, mark stuff as read until what remains is a handful of the most interesting. Are you facing that scenario a lot? Time to cut some subscriptions. Start with the ones you often mark as read. Are you having trouble deciding what to keep or let go? Lower your RSS reeder’s maximum number of items and old stuff will go just go away! You won’t miss it. If you do, odds are you’ll remember enough to find it again.
The result for me is a selection of content I want but never get overwhelmed by.
Remember you’re running the conveyor belt on yourself. Your bookmarks are piling up because you are making the pile bigger! Stop adding to the pile! Delete all those interesting bookmarks you can leverage but haven’t. You won’t. They have gone over their expiration date of excitement. Next time you feel like adding anything, pause for longer before you do. Is that bookmark really worth adding, or is it the FOMO[1] talking?
I have yet to come up with a good way to harness them... every once in a while I go back and look at the tags and use them for research.
Tabs are just as bad... I get too many and then I stash them with one-tab and then repeat.
Then I leave it, uncleaned. There's no value to deleting bookmarks. They just lie in a pile of digital limbo.
I try to avoid all knowledge that isn't utilized in some way. Knowledge for inspiration is utilization. Knowledge to make the decision whether or not to utilize that knowledge (e.g. understanding functional programming) is also utilization. Otherwise it's procrastination.
You pay twice for anything. Once when you spend the time to read it. A second time when you act on it. Make sure you can afford the second cost.
There will never be enough time to thoroughly investigate them all.
They are important to me, and I stay on Firefox, instead of Safari, because the FF bookmark tech is better.