Maybe you should try only bookmarking things that you can successfully write a paragraph about.
Why is it significant? What did it make you think about or feel? How would you like to use it?
Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#12TLDR: a few bookmarking management tricks and accepting some basic truths about my bookmarking habits has really helped me.
I used to spend a lot of time organizing and metadataing my bookmarks - this was back in the day when I used Opera, which had better bookmarking capabilities than Chrome - but stopped once I realized I never clicked on most bookmarks and that I was just wasting time and causing myself anxiety because I had hundreds of links that I was supposed to explore in my todo folder.
Today I just use Chrome's built-in bookmark manager to handle 50-100 bookmark across three folders:
* "tools", "articles": these are references that I use frequently enough that I want to be able to find them through the address bar. I almost never bookmark articles because I know that I can always find stuff thru google (I have maybe only 20 articles bookmarked). Also, Chrome's internal search engine is so mediocre that it often fails to find bookmarked articles so why bother in the first place. It really helps me to remember that content curation on the web is so fine grained and available for the most specialized topics that I know I can get high quality links collections on any topic imaginable because even my very specific problems, questions and curiosities are shared by millions of people.
* "todo": this is just a collection of articles, clips, movies and music that I couldn't fully explore in a minute or two when I first stumbled upon the link. If a bookmark has been in this folder for more than a few weeks, I just delete it. Truly good content tends to be shared and re-shared by millions of people so nothing worthwhile disappears on the web.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#13Why 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…
Re Index and Search
You can save the whole article in Evernote. That makes it searchable.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#14Why 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…
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Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#15TEN 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.
I have 13k over 10 years.
Edit: not proud of it.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#16I declare bookmark bankruptcy every several weeks by doing a hard reset after exporting all my bookmarks from Chrome and deleting all the bookmarks except the ones in the toolbar (the ones I really use). Next, I email that bookmark file as an attachment to myself in Gmail and a filter puts it in a bookmarks folder. Usually, if I am searching for something and can find a couple keywords in the title, the bookmarks attachment is found in the Gmail search and then the actual bookmark can be found by viewing the entire bookmark file.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#17I use Evernote rather than bookmark, which you get organized with nothing but folder structuring. It's totally hard to manage, validate, and find when you want to.
Evernote, on the other hand, provides a creative means: taking a note on your own way. By creating a Notebook and a Note, you can give a brief statement of the linked articles, which could come in useful for later full-text search.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#18Here's something that has worked for me - before bookmarking, decide if the article is something you need in the immediate future (within the next couple of days) or is it something that you might need to refer to at some later date.
If it is something you need now, email yourself that article [1], send it to your kindle [2] or save it to a separate board on Trello. Delete it once you are done with it.
For the second case, use an app like Pocket or Instapaper [3].
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#19I use https://getpocket.com as a "bookmarks manager", which offers some additional features over your standard browser bookmarks menu. Basically, you store articles in a personal queue and can archive them when you're done, and everything is searchable.
One way to think of this is that being a "digital hoarder" is way less destructive than being a physical one. Digital storage is cheap these days. You don't need to remove any bookmarks (or "saved articles" as Pocket calls them), since they'll just be "old articles at the back of the queue, which may be interesting to browse sometime in the future, but if I'm not interested I'll just ignore them and look at the front of the queue instead, since the stuff I've saved recently more likely lines up with my current interests."
Pocket also suggests recommended articles for you to read (which I suppose could just add more stress to your system) but I've often found their recommendation algorithm to be pretty good.
Re: Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?
#20Don't worry about the bookmark collection you already have. There's no pressure to read through it and no pressure to throw it away. That's the great thing about a digital hoarding habit -- it doesn't fill up your house and disrupt your life like physical junk would.
If you're concerned about the time you spend scanning through HN and creating the bookmarks in the first place, what you should do is replace that activity with something else. Concrete example: I decided to eat less junk food, and the way I did it was by filling the fridge with healthy foods which I could eat whenever I got the urge for a snack. It's much easier to replace than abstain.