Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

If you take a book and highlight everything, it's the same as highlighting nothing. Same with bookmarks. You need to keep them meaningful.

Hi my name's Ian and I'm a digital hoarder.

I totally agree on the digital hoarding. Just so happens that my mum is a physical hoarder - and that is much worse than a digital one.

I have 10872 links inside pinboard.

I think there is a big connection between my timewasting and wanting to hoard links.

I've managed to trim down any other bookmarking applications so that I just have pinboard. I'd highly recommend this, pinboard is beautifully simple and keeps very focussed on doing nothing but bookmarking. So that at least you don't waste any more time than just bookmarking.

Most people here seem to advise about ways of making it easier to bookmark things.

I however have tried to make it harder for myself to bookmark things. I've deleted all the shortcuts / browser plugins that I had to quickly save and tag things. So the only way to add URLs is to do it by going to pinboard itself and manually typing in the URL and title plus tags.

It's a small hurdle but it does slow the flow.

Edit: this got my bookmarking down from 5-20 a day to 2-3 a day.

Now I just need to find my local bookmarking anonymous meeting.

I'm conflicted now on whether to bookmark this conversation or not. :) But in seriousness, I go through this cycle every few months but nothing really sticks. I've given up trying to change my habit. Edge cases always come up that justify the need for bookmarking.

Instead, I'm looking to leverage these bookmarks as a custom knowledge base. My current thinking is to just build a search app with a database from my bookmarks (i use pocket and its search is decent but not great), which lets me retrieve articles based on context and lets me take notes against articles.

Think of it as a cross-indexed commonplace book, but not tied down to folder hierarchies.

Evernote doesn't work for me cause I obsess over folder hierarchies to the point where its OCD. Search is what works for me.

I did try to apply this somewhat - I would by default list all my bookmarks as 'to read'. Then I didn't feel the need to read them, just dump them and get on with my life.

Then if I ever came back to them, then I would mark them as read and star them.

However I found this doesn't really cure the addiction (I still would endlessly go searching and bookmarking articles.), but it did help and got me less precious about dumping an article.

So I think you do have to go through this stage.

Hoever now, I'm simply trying to make it harder for myself to bookmark (only manually via the 'add URL' link in pinboard), so I now end up only bookmarking about 1 in 3 of the articles I open. I'm less concerned about just closing the tab.

I use buffer to queue up my bookmarks across different services. It looks like I'm posting stuff on social networks, but really I'm just backing up links I find interesting.