31–40 of 133 posts
For the TODO list, I can share one frame of mind that I use. I have a "now", "soon", and "later" section in my TODO list. "Now" grows and shrinks, but never gets out of control. Things sometimes move from "now" to "soon" or "later." I am constantly working off of this list. The "soon" section varies. Often, things get pulled into "now", when they become time sensitive. Some things stick around long enough and it beco…
I declared Instapaper bankruptcy last month when I moved to Pocket. I used to add about 10 links a day to Instapaper thinking that one day I would come around to reading them all. Lol, never going to happen. I moved to Pocket because my Kobo Elipsa has integration with it. But because of this, my filter to adding to Pocket is now "Will I read this link on my Elipsa". If not, why add to it in the first place. So after…
On an unrelated note, try raindrop.io. I "was" a pocket customer for 4+ years until I discovered raindrop.io. Now I don't want to go back to pocket again. Do give raindrop.io a try. Fyi, it does NOT have "For You" recommendations.
For the TODO list, I can share one frame of mind that I use. I have a "now", "soon", and "later" section in my TODO list. "Now" grows and shrinks, but never gets out of control. Things sometimes move from "now" to "soon" or "later." I am constantly working off of this list. The "soon" section varies. Often, things get pulled into "now", when they become time sensitive. Some things stick around long enough and it beco…
- Now = in progress
- Soon = selected for development
- Later = backlog
Occasionally I've found it useful to bring work concepts like this into my personal life.
The only problem you mention is storage, and as you mention it's pretty easy to solve by just buying more. You could also refinance and move the big (not-so-important) files onto cheap hard drives or other "cold storage" to free up space on your devices.
As to "read it later" lists and such; I would give up. It sounds a bit perfectionistic to want to consume it all and miss/loose nothing. Don't ask the impossible of yourself to go through all of it, at least half of it is outdated or not relevant anymore, I'm sure there are better ways to spend your time. Interesting and important things will resurface.
Generally my attitude is: If it doesn't impact me negatively, I don't care. I see it as organized chaos; minimizing time spend on organizing while maximizing utility. Storage is cheap and search is pretty powerful these days.
Those tools are there for you, not the other way around. Use the ones that help you or bring you joy, ignore (or delete) the rest.
Who cares? We all have thousands of accounts at this point especially if you've been using the internet since the 90s. Learn to just be okay with stuff. Literally not everything that you have is a red badge that needs to be addressed immediately.
I mean if you want to go off of raw files I have multiple tens of millions of files on my computers. Did I make them all? No. I mean most of them are just files that just happened to be there because computers have files.
Cool you got likes awesome.
Cool you got bookmarks awesome.
I don't know my overarching advice to you because it seems like you're paying attention to everything at the same time with equal weighting on everything is that you just stop doing that.
Stop worrying about inbox zero. Stop trying to read everything. Admit to yourself you neither care about reading every tab you have open, or will get round to dealing with them -- periodically go through them and close them. Stop making the to-do a bucket list and just do what you can do. Chill out. This is absolutely my own experience, my own opinion. I've been you, I've burned out. Life is short, there is so much t…
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. This reads as if you are in a zone of problems and locked in a decision-problem?
What do people even put on these?
A list containing miscelanous stuff like "read book x" or" visit place y" serves no purpose other than having an ever growing list of stuff you will never do.
Pocket is the first thing i throw out on an fresh Firefox install. Had no idea what purpose it serves until recently and though it to be bloatware added by Mozzilla to make a quick buck.
Never understodd the idea of something like that.
Why would i want dump of unread tabs and random crap i stumble upon to be splerched over all my devices? Makes no sense since the work tabs differ from the private one and the stuff on the phone.
If it is a random article i just read it or open it in a tab.
Every couple of days (or if the tabs annoy me) i just closeall my browser tabs and thats it.
If its work related i close the tabs belonging to that task if the task is done.
Bookmarks are used for pages i visit often (not random crap!) to help the autocompletion to do its job properly on freshly synced devices.
Why would i want to store a news article anywhere? Its outdated tomorrow. If that random article, blogpost or recipe for fried carrot soup is not ready by me today i will never read it. So why would i keep it?
Here is what i use:
I have a really dumb shopping list app for groceries on my phone. Milk emtpy? -> untic milk so i do not forget it next time i am shopping. A genereal TODO list is just overhead here.
A calendar including birthdays, some reminders for important (!) events (important like: the plane starts at 07).
For work there is some management tool for the tasks that need to be done (provided by the company for company stuff).
Contacts synced via DAV (Phone numbers and the like) i do not use Facebook, Google or anything like that (nobody should really).
People i have not met for a year or two get deleted. The random party guy gets deleted quickly if i do not think i will meet him again in the near future.
Bookmarks and Passwords are synced via Firefox (not the tabs!).
I have a collection of a few GB of music, all of which i like and have heard multiple times.
A bunch of photos, i put the the Photos i like to long term storage (an external hard drive).
The rest get auto deleted when the smartphone dies or needs a reset or i fidget with the bootloader and wipe everything.
No automatic sync via Google, Dropox or whatever (these a just giant garbage dumps).
As for emails:
I try to keep my inbox empty, not by reading, but by preventing inflow.
That means not giving mail address away willy-nilly.
That means i unsubsribe from those spam thingies every webshop has (i don't care that the Plumbus is 20% off today), i unsubsrcibe from every mailinglist, RSSand what not the moment i deliveres the slightest annoyance by wasting my time. That is, manually deleting crap i did not want to read.
My unread inbox is generally empty all the time because i just do not accept time wasting garbage there. And the garbage threshold is very very low.
That is really awesome, because i never miss the impotant messages.
Not sure what to do if you are a compulsive hoarder of data garbage.
Maybe some sort of deprecation would help. Hoarding animals have the advantage that the stuff they hoard becomes compost after some time.
If this where to be true for data, that would be quite nice because there would be an upper limit of items (dependent on the rate of influx)
But ultimately there is too much media to consume, too many places to visit and too much stuff to do in a lifetime.
Not sure why people do that i am too lazy to bother with lists.
I can understand people collecting things for a hobby. Like movies or stamps.
But never try to collect everything, collect the things you like.
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 tasks, and the right column is non-urgent tasks.
Items in the top-left "important and urgent" box are usually problems. These are emergencies, and they're typically respawning hydra heads. It's tempting to spend lots of your time here, but if you do that, you'll turn into someone who's always putting out fires. It's necessary to do some of this stuff here, but where possible, you want to minimize your time here.
Items in the bottom-left "not important but urgent" box are usually other people's problems and emergencies: people sending you emails, text messages, calls, requests, favor requests, etc. The more you respond to this stuff, the more people will send to you. This became particularly vivid to me one week when I was exceptionally on top of my email inbox, and by the time I'd finish an inbox zero session, half the emails had already come back as replies.
Items in the bottom-right "not important and not urgent" box are time wasting activities you don't really want to do.
The top-right "important but not urgent" box is really where you want to spend your time. These are preventative, foundational, strategic, and restorative tasks that help you live your life according to your values, act at your best, and get things under control. It's not just work stuff, either. It's taking care of your relationships and recreation and health, too. The more time you spend here, the less you'll see urgent work piling up from yourself and from others.