Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#1

Post by agrocrag » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 4:41 AM UTC

Hey there! Long time reader (and bookmarker) of HN. I wondering how others deal with an obsession to bookmark things. I constantly scan HN all day and few other sites and bookmark things I fear I'll miss or could be useful in the future.

This nasty habit has accrued 10k+ of bookmarks/pocketed articles/saved threads. I'll never get around to reading them all but I have a ton of anxiety of removing them. I feel like a digital hoarder.

Any advice on how to set me down a path to change this habit?

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#2

Post by corememory » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 5:32 AM UTC

On HN, you can bookmark articles and comments simply by upvoting or favoriting them. To find them later, use the links at the bottom of your user page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=agrocrag

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#3

Post by aerovistae » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 5:44 AM UTC

TEN THOUSAND? And I thought I was bad, I have a couple hundred.

You have to set aside a block of time to go through them and categorize them and be honest: I have one lifetime. Will I ever really use this?

There is a threshhold on diversification of your focus, beyond which you will ruin any chance you ever had of accomplishing anything.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#4

Post by jcrben » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 5:54 AM UTC

Figure out what you really want to learn and accomplish. I've found that as I understand the fundamentals better and have a comfortable workflow, checking out cool new stuff doesn't seem so necessary.

I keep a lot of personal information organized. I go thru bookmarks about once a week and move them to text notes. Something I want to learn? It goes into an anki flash card. General reference? Goes into my markdown notes, or I might edit the appropriate Wikipedia aricle instead. Helpful for a side project? Toss it the project readme for later.

I also use something like Trello (zenkit) to keep a long list of "maybe never" projects where I can toss cool stuff I'll probably never get into. These may be organized as well, so if I see something cool about say, game programming in C, I can toss it into the existing maybe never game coding project note.

Also, if I have unread bookmarks that can be understood/used without coding, I read them on the go with my phone as much as possible.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#5

Post by axaxs » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 5:58 AM UTC

Organize them into folders. All of them, with no exceptions. Having to take an action on each one will lead to removing many. Hoarding is a symptom of procrastination.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#6

Post by fudged71 » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 6:01 AM UTC

Links rot over time.

That's why I stopped bookmarking and started notebooking. Evernote as a personal knowledgebase.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#7

Post by alexvoda » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 6:09 AM UTC

Why do you feel you need to change this habit? The only thing I think needs changing is the bookmark management system. I also have a ton of bookmarks. They serve as a sort of personal search engine. I just wish the bookmark manager would actually index the pages so that I can search through content as well. (I also want it to be FLOSS and self-hosted. None of this proprietary Cloud SaaS stuff that can go away at any moment)

And as someone else said, link rot is a real issue. mostly alleviated for me by Archive.org + an extension. But actually saving the pages would be better.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#8

Post by gammarator » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

Tag and release.

I use Pinboard and have 6.5k links saved. I bookmark things not to come back to them, but so I can get them out of my browser and off my mind. I tag things as they go in (the auto-suggested tags make this fast), and I don't stress about whether I'll ever look at them again. Then if later I find I do want them, they're just a quick search away. And indeed, I do come back and dig things out with some frequency.

(This is a piece of the GTD mindset, but since it's digital it's effectively free--no file cabinet full of folders you have to sort through.)

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#9

Post by brianobush » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 6:16 AM UTC

Try to read and take notes (I do it on paper) as you find new things. Shelving things for the future is futile and I have stopped. The really good stuff gets sent to instapaper and starred with an appropriate tag.

Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

#10

Post by niyazpk » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 6:17 AM UTC

I used to have the same problem(, I still have).

I had accumulated over a thousand bookmarks and was having trouble deleting them. "I want to learn {subject} some day, so cannot lose this article". Related was the issue of not able to close my browser because I easily can have 30+ tabs open at the same time. Again the same fear, don't want to lose track of that new article on ML.

Something that helped me relieve the pain a lot was to start using OneTab extension for Chrome. OneTab allows me to close tabs without feeling guilty. OneTab keeps track of the links so that I have a way of getting them back if required, and at the same time - it removed the necessity for me to bookmark them individually and organising them and obsessing over them.

So in the end, I still keep the links around in OneTab, but I have found that it is much better for my stress levels that having to hoard the links in my main (chrome) bookmarks.