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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?

#91

Post by dredmorbius »

imtringued wrote: post #85
dredmorbius wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately for you, you'll discover soon enough that Pocket is utterly useless for accessing/reading the contents you've saved. It's Mozilla's Giant Cloud Recycle Bin.

I tried it but it doesn't even work with pdfs. Why bother?

Trust me, I'm a strong critic: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...

That said: it manages a fair bit of web content. Tags can be added. The URLs and tags can be exported.

To that end, it is not entirely useless. Only very nearly so.

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

#92

Post by antwerp1 »

1. Unsubscribe. From everything you haven’t read in the past year or so. This obviously has compounding benefits, assuming you refrain from further subscriptions.

2. Delete. Flag what you need to save and delete everything else (or vice versa, filter and delete anything you don’t need). A fully clean inbox/browser will provide daily motivation to keep it clean.

3. Review all your bookmarks/tabs, etc and identify 10-20 general themes. What are you interested in? Can you start an activity or program that would allow you to review some of your favorited content in a more organic fashion?

To-do lists can be off-putting, and I doubt you would ever sit down to read through hundreds of webpages in abstraction. By applying it to a project or educational program, you will have a tangible product/outcome, and find that you don’t need as many bookmarks on that topic. (Or maybe you’ll create more.. at least, they’ll be different).

Whenever I do this, I find myself deleting about 10% of bookmarks with every new project (and adding back less than that).

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

#94

Post by rr808 »

koliber wrote: post #10

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 do this but "later" usually just always grows and grows, even though they're relevant I just delete the whole thing once a year.

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

#95

Post by elamje »

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 guide below got me from 2,000 unreads to inbox zero in less than 30 minutes. The key is to archive pretty much everything older than a month or two since it likely wasn’t getting done anyways. You can still search archives if you do remember something later.

Like the other poster said - take it easy. I have thousands of bookmarks too, and I know one of these days I’ll write a script to get it all exported, but until then, I’m going to continue appending.

https://klinger.io/posts/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmai...

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

#96

Post by alfiedotwtf »

dredmorbius wrote: post #66
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #9

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…

Fortunately for you, you'll discover soon enough that Pocket is utterly useless for accessing/reading the contents you've saved. It's Mozilla's Giant Cloud Recycle Bin.

Weird. To be honest, I've found it to be really nice. I'm also happy that I've finally found a way to give Mozilla money

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

#97

Post by alfiedotwtf »

imtringued wrote: post #85
dredmorbius wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately for you, you'll discover soon enough that Pocket is utterly useless for accessing/reading the contents you've saved. It's Mozilla's Giant Cloud Recycle Bin.

I tried it but it doesn't even work with pdfs. Why bother?

Neither does Instapaper. But why would I use Pocket to read a PDF on my ebook reader, when I could just download the PDF on my phone, upload it to Dropbox, and then instantly read it on my ebook reader from there

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

#98

Post by surajs »

heikkilevanto wrote: post #62
koliber wrote: post #10

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 have two piles: "Time to do something about", and "Time has done something about". Amazing how many things kind of fade out in time.

No post body was provided.

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

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #97
imtringued wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it but it doesn't even work with pdfs. Why bother?

Neither does Instapaper. But why would I use Pocket to read a PDF on my ebook reader, when I could just download the PDF on my phone, upload it to Dropbox, and then instantly read it on my ebook reader from there

My view is: why have an article management system that's limited to only a single document format?

Pocket provides a place to archive and tag or organise content. What format that content is in ... I could care less.

For PDFs, my main problem is in organising metadata. Especially on a tablet, where despite having ample storage, the only real organisation schemes I can come up with are expressive filenames (which are a pain to apply) and directory-based storage.

For both, my best way of accomplishing this is through a Linux environment such as Termux, and an external keyboard.

Tools such as Calibre or Zotero would be handy. Niether has a full-featured tablet port.

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

#100

Post by sanderjd »

I had an idea about this just today: What I want is to be able to quickly save things off without cluttering up tabs (like a "read later") but be periodically reminded what's in there. My thinking is a daily digest pulling a random sample of the saved articles, with quick actions to either leave things on the pile if I'm still interested but still don't have time to read or to remove them if I've lost interest.

Anyone know of anything like this?

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