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

Personal finance analogy is probably incorrect. My guess is a better analogy is notebook/journal/scrapbook.

Think of all of these items as short/medium term working memory. Rather than looking at the items as intrinsically valuable, think about the outcome as intrinsically valuable and the items as vehicles to get some job done.

Perhaps you have some goal, such as learning to play piano, getting promoted to lead engineer, starting your own company. If that's the case, if there's important material you discover, take as many notes as you need (which could be nothing) as you work through the as much of the material as you need (which could be very little) and go from there.

In and of itself, storing likes, bookmarks, papers, movies, photos, files, etc is just hoarding. And in fact, it's a form of procrastination that feels like a great substitute for doing the actual thing you are trying to get done.

Let go of all that "helpful" content and you are thrust in front of the giant, scary, empty space of what is between you and your goal. Sit with that space, let it wash over you, and you won't need any of the other junk anymore.

Reincarnation!

Ok, on a serious note: Start a new bookmark thing, take some time to briefly gaze over what you have and duplicate the good stuff in the new thing.

In hindsight it's pretty easy to see what your folder names should have been.

Before I would just save the bookmarks as some kind of html document and name the folder after the year. It's not that useful for things you want to use frequently which is... well.. what you use most frequently.

Get away from all these things just long enough to write down an overarching goal for your life. Include your loved ones in this goal-setting. Discard, delete, unsubscribe, close, destroy all of those things that obscure your path towards that goal.

I use Now, Soon, and Later lists too (in separate text files), but time box them to Today, This Week, and Later. Every Sunday, I review my Later list and pull items into my This Week list. Every evening, I review my This Week list and prepare tomorrow's Today list.

With this system, I can focus on Today's relevant items, knowing they are the right ones and not have to stress about future work because I know it's captured in my Later list and I won't lose it because I review the Later list every Sunday. Ideally my Today list should be empty at the end of every day and my This Week list empty at the end of every week, but unfortunately that rarely happens.

I have the same problem and I'm writing an app to help with this.

I think a lot of the solution will come with personal experience and getting better at filtering content before it gets into the system. A relevant analogy is I click on way fewer HN links on the front page than I used to, and that's because I know the time to check out most topics could be better used elsewhere.

I also just stopped opening Pocket one day and my life probably improved. Same with GMail, email bankrupcy is a good thing, just archive everything and move on with your life.

For everything else it's a matter of having a system that lets you prioritise things and focus on them in order of importance. If you never get to the unimportant things it'll be ok.