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Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#121

Post by slightwinder »

dredmorbius wrote: post #102
slightwinder wrote: post #37

What is the point of collecting, if you don't consume them? Do you even consume? How many of them are still relevant? How many of those items have any relevant worth? Does this harm your live? Or is this separate from important items? You should figure out which are important, and get rid of the irrelevant. And better start with the biggest storage-waste to free your space. And if you can't decide, remove it all. Thi…

Even if you've only given the material a cursory glance, an archive of content you've previously vetted to some degree becomes a useful future reference source. If you've further annotated the material (added tags or other metadata), then the value increases further. What's the use of a library, generally? It doesn't have to be read to be useful, at least not in its entirety. It may exist to be queried, or to vet/val…

That are many assumptions, in a thread of someone asking for help.

Yes, a good well maintained archive can be a useful tool, of you are actually using it. But OP was asking for help, and not explaining much about the purpose and usage of their collected data. So I assume the most common case here, and say OP is simply a hoarder.

Collecting is a disease, and a very common around here. People take anything that seems mildly interesting with the mindset that it might have some worth at some later point, to never see it again and let it rot in an unmaintainable mountain of datawaste. OP seems to be in that situation, so the first important step is to reflect on the data, their purpose, their benefit and their harm for you. Then you can start with the organizing and maintaining.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#122

Post by shebnik »

Happened few times with me: - I got subscribed to a several telegram groups following same event (last time - Ukraine). Found that I am spending all my time following them, and that guys are often reposting each others. Quickly unsubscribed from most redundant. - Tend to keep few browser with ~1000 'interesting, useful, definitely study - try' stuff. Sometimes I loose whole session for a dumb reason - browser erased it, or I closed main process and then some stupid pop-up window with a single page, etc. And I don't feel I lost anything useful :) Once I spent few days and processed all tabs, put into online links organizer (just found it's name - Pocket), added keywords to everything... and then I managed to accumulate another 1k tabs few more times. Never returned to that sorted stuff.

As per emails - one time I had 6month business trip and worked on customer site, used mostly my second mail account at customer's domain and rarely checked my main account - too many noise there, CC ALL, etc. When I returned back I found ~40k unread letters. So... I created separate outlook file and moved there everything from these 6 month, and never touched it. My logic was if something had anything important to ask me or share they would do it again, or already duplicated request on my second account. After a month I simply deleted that second mail file (~2gb).

When you are getting older you understand that you should balance between consuming and creating. Nobody would remember you or respect your for skillful consuming :)

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#123

Post by iex_xei »

This is from Richard Koch's 80/20 Principle:

Time management often advises people to categorize their list of ‘to do’ activities into A, B, C or D priorities. In practice, most people end up classifying 60­-70 per cent of their activities as A or B priorities. They conclude that what they are really short of is time. This is why they were interested in time management to start with. So they end up with better planning, longer working hours, greater earnestness and usually greater frustration too. They become addicted to time management, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what they do, or significantly lower their level of guilt that they are not doing enough.

My personal method might be to compare these items with each other, and pick 10-20% of them. Randomly list 10 of these and pick one that you want, and discard/archive the rest. If you ask whether you want to read/do something, the answer is always "yeah", but if you compare these with each other, you'll see a pattern. Comparing and deciding is more difficult, by the way, and it results to store less of these in time.

Whatever you do, give up the guilt first. Guilt never leads to productivity or happiness.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#124

Post by dredmorbius »

slightwinder wrote: post #121
dredmorbius wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you've only given the material a cursory glance, an archive of content you've previously vetted to some degree becomes a useful future reference source. If you've further annotated the material (added tags or other metadata), then the value increases further. What's the use of a library, generally? It doesn't have to be read to be useful, at least not in its entirety. It may exist to be queried, or to vet/val…

That are many assumptions, in a thread of someone asking for help. Yes, a good well maintained archive can be a useful tool, of you are actually using it. But OP was asking for help, and not explaining much about the purpose and usage of their collected data. So I assume the most common case here, and say OP is simply a hoarder. Collecting is a disease, and a very common around here. People take anything that seems m…

Your own question was "what is the use". I provided a use, based on common cases.

OP hasn't clearly indicated why they are collecting information and obligations. That was highlighted in my own top-level response:

Figure out your goals, what's important to you, what's necessary (regardless of whether you like it or not). Count that in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31472082

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#125

Post by cupofpython »

Isolate the things that grow nonstop, and remove necessary items from isolation when they can be organized appropriately. There will always be more available than you can consume, and I find that pulling the right things from the never ending streams to be more of a game than it is a fully executable chore

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#126

Post by xtracto »

>Reduce my spending (unsubscribe, stop consuming feeds)?

I used to be a heavy consumer of digital content. I was subscribed to hundreds of sources and RSS feeds first through Thunderbird, then through google reader. All of them were "learning" material (I.e. not gossip) , and it included some podcasts. I thought I was being productive with my time, and it mattered to me .

But then my mind changed, I thought about all the stuff i read about that didn't matter or that I didn't use. I changed my approach and now I try to produce more than I consume. The little stuff I read about, I try to apply it somewhere.

Also, I've started doing more things offline: I'm doing way more exercise, playing a musical instrument and even playing SNES games.

The online world started to feel too much in a hurry and "extremist" for me.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#127

Post by csallen »

dchuk wrote: post #76
csallen wrote: post #39

Some categories of work are like respawning hydra heads: the more tasks you do, the more tasks reappear in their place. Other categories of work are preventative: the more work you do, the less respawning hydra work you get. The goal is to do more preventative work. To visualize this, use the Eisenhower Matrix: a 2x2 grid. The top row is important tasks, the bottom row is unimportant tasks, the left column is urgent…

So how do you do this in practice? Tag up your todo list with urgent and important and then only pull from the appropriate things? Literally visualize tasks in the grid?

Just now seeing this, but yes, every Sunday I try to make a new Eisenhower matrix for my life, and I put high-level tasks in it. It's a great way to not only plan, but to audit, and see which quadrants I'm actually spending my time on.

Tagging your todo list can work, too. I'd probably just tag the urgent-but-not-important stuff — strategic, meaningful, preventative stuff — and then have a policy to prioritize those tasks as much as possible, even if it means other things slide.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#128

Post by lcall »

Some here have written helpful things about prioritizing. But to choose priorities, I think one needs to know one's purpose, in life.

I arrange everything based on that, using a "pvsgeer" framework: purpose, vision, strategy, empowerment/execution, report/review/repeat.

I wrote some things at my web site about purpose in life (in profile, no ads or sales), whether one is religious or not. (If you want details and can't find them, you can email me--it is in the site footer.) It revolves around learning (personal growth in ability to serve one's family and others), and then service. There are important things to learn about the nature of life that also help.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#129

Post by partomniscient »

fovc wrote: post #75
tene80i wrote: post #41

Relax, be kind to yourself. The finance analogy isn’t right, because debt is something you have to pay and these things, or at least most of them, don’t require you to do anything. If you have too many emails to get through, yes, unsubscribe ruthlessly. If your storage costs too much, yes, delete ruthlessly. Now, accept that you will never make use of everything you’ve found. That doesn’t matter. That’s also true of…

> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point…

The important distinction being that there's a tried and trusted method for sorting information in a printed book library.

Not so much for a 'virtual anti-library' inconsistently spread out all over the internet in a multitude of different incompatible formats (e.g. forums, youtube subscriptions, twitter), as well as various 'local' ones like email and the 'todo' list.

The value of a library also is largely dependent on being able to find things (or definitively 'not find things') in it quickly and easily.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

#130

Post by marttt »

I had a successful low-volume bookmark system in a single text file:

1. paste the URL in the file

2. add a free-form description to it by hand

The hand-typing part proved to be a fairly good "bullshit filter": typing a description is annoying, so I ended up storing only the most relevant links, for which I was willing to write a short description in my own words. Compare that to the save-and-forget systems where storing and tagging a link takes about a second.

If you like free-form systems, there's also good ol' One Big Text File, a strangely effective solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167

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