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Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?
190 points by miguelrochefort on May 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 123 comments
I have thousands of online accounts, hundreds of thousands of saved items (likes, bookmarks, papers, books, movies, videos, photos, files, open tabs, tasks), hundreds of inbox and feeds, and they just can't seem to stop growing.

Inbox zero is now a rare occurrence, only made possible by abusing Gmail's snooze function. My phone, laptop, and clouds are full.

Using personal finance analogies, should I:

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

- Pay back my debt (consume the saved items)? Perhaps using the debt-snowball method?

- Get more credit (file storage) so that I can spend (save items) more?

- Declare bankruptcy (delete everything)?




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 libraries and the world in general.

So don’t worry about getting through them. You cannot.

Just remove anything that causes problems (incoming streams, expensive storage), and then enjoy your curated things at whatever pace you feel like.

You can’t finish it, ever. But that doesn’t mean it is a problem you need to solve. It means it’s a selection to taste from.


> 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 that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

I'd say just get a filing/search system and be happy to have a large antilibrary


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.


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...


Yes. This. Relax and be kind to yourself. Know how to never miss the important emails and todos, but treat everything else as a "stream". I don't ever get to inbox zero because what's the point? How will that help me? Bookmark and save everything you like, as long as you can find the important stuff. I.e. in your reminders/Asana/Trello/todo app, have a "someday maybe" list of stuff you might get to one day but it's not going to be a disaster if you miss it.. same with bookmarks - save it and in the future you can search for it if you need it. Don't let the tools run you.


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 becomes clear they don't need to get done soon, despite of what I thought. These move to the "later" list.

The "later" list is interesting. Most of the time time, I don't touch these things. But occasionally, I look through it, and realize I am in the mood to do one of them, and then I work on it. Or the circumstances align and the situation is just perfect to get one of those items done. Occasionally, I go through it, and find things on there that are no longer relevant, and I remove them. For other things, I put them into various "fanciful idea" lists which are noncommittal, don't weigh me down, and could serve as inspiration if a need arises.


And just for "fun" (YMMV on that!), these correspond with the basic columns on a Kanban board:

- 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.


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 a similar approach, I found some kanban concepts useful to prevent queues

- board structure to aid sorting before a "commitment point", e.g. "Options/New" - Later(6 weeks) - Soon (in the next 7 days)

- Now (usually just the top or highlighted item in "soon") - Done - Closed

- Closed" to place items that are dismissed

- Work in Progress (WIP) - Limits on all columns - maximum number of items

Throughput

- average capacity: number of cards completed or closed in a typical week

- useful to keep track of: when I complete a card, I add a dot somewhere (usually on a "note card") to count it for the week, and add info when blocked by sth

- this number varies, but is a useful indicator how much I can realistically process in a week - for example, 5 items/cards

WIP (Work in progress) limits

- visualize expectations - what can realistically be achieved in this timeframe

- set per column limits - when more cards are in the column, I have to remove some or transfer them to a wishlist

- wip limits determined by average number of cards closed or done per week (throughput); e.g. "Later (WIP 20)"; "Soon" - WIP 5;

Managing Flow / preventing queues

- planning with smaller steps (could each be done in a day) to enable learning

- avoiding a situation when too many things are started but not completed

- understanding the cost of queues: nothing gets done for a long time, and then all at once (unpredictable patterns); or the value diminishes (cost of delay)


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.


Brilliant! My other pile is called “never”. It’s my out of sight, out of mind pile. The digital cemetery where I store ideas and things that could have made sense, but now don’t. And they’re still around if I need a bit of inspiration.


I’m building an app for exactly this approach - FocusTask.app


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.


This is as much a comment to myself as to you or anyone else (I've got some similar hoarding tendencies): it really doesn't matter.

I had a realisation the other day - it happened after I accidentally perma-deleted my Wallabag install. I was sad for about 5 minutes that those hundreds of "read later" articles weren't ever going to get read later - and then this was followed by the most immense relief.

I'm going to try and apply this sense of cathartic relief to the rest of my over-bloated, never-looked-at, just-no-time storage. I've got a feeling the act of deleting it all is going to hurt like hell for a short while and then it'll feel like a huge weight lifted.

I'm never going to be short of things to read or watch, and life is way too short.


Two specific resources for you.

First, the Eisenhower matrix of important/urgent:

https://www.techtello.com/eisenhower-productivity-matrix/

Use this framework to filter your content. I bet most of it fits in quadrants 3/4.

Second, check this time management talk

It's not what you read, it's what you ignore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWPgUn8tL8s

Tons of useful information there. One key takeaway is: do less stuff, but of higher quality.


Here's a free Franklin Covey lecture series (3 hourlong parts), explaining how to manage a diary using the Eisenhower matrix [0].

It breeds the habit of prioritizing/scheduling taskflow as things come in and trying to maximize time spent on non-urgent but important tasks.

[0]https://youtu.be/vEVWAhrZNcE


>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.


You need to step away from the internet for a while. Go outside. Talk to people in person. Realize the real world is far more interesting than the digital one and just forget about all that digital nonsense.


this is a good one. Plus some other comment that said, be kind to yourself.


It's better to read less and understand every bit of it than to read more and understand nothing.

99% of the "saves" that you've gathered are probably not touched for months, or years, or most possibly will never be touched. Drop them at once.

Focus on the 1% that matter. Break that 1% into smaller chunks that you CAN read and understand. Once done, move them to your "archives".

Divide, prioritize, and conquer. Don't fall for the trap set by the "marketing gurus" telling you to read 30+ books a year or read 10+ articles a day. You are never going to be able to benefit from all of that anyway.

Divide, prioritize, and conquer..


You should re-frame the list not as something that you must do, but as a list which captures ideas. If you have some spur-of-the-moment idea and don't capture it in the to-do list, you might forget it, for good.

The list can be sorted: you can prioritize things you can realistically do and that you are motivated to do, by moving them to the top. Then you can take the perspective of the shorter list, which is less daunting.

Split it into regions: things to do this week, things to do this year, ... or whatever.

You can also go through the list from time to time and cull ideas that don't seem useful after the passage of some time. That can keep it smaller.


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 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.


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.


Aggressive selectivity. 90% of everything is garbage, soooo.

Bias toward actionable. If it isn't actionable, toss it. If it's actionable, but you haven't acted in some arbitrary period of time, toss it. For the remainder, act.

Periodic ruthless purges. Does it MATTER? If you cannot identify a clear "Hell yes" alignment with your lived values and goals toward which you are actively working, toss it.

Staged purging: automatically send anything older than some arbitrary period of time to a staging purgatory area. Anything that remain there beyond some other arbitrary period of time: toss it.

Nuke: Wipe it all and start over, paying more attention (as above) this time.


You’re gonna need to set aside some dedicated time for this. Putting this off will only make this work.

First, unsubscribe from marketing emails, or use filters and folders in Gmail (if that’s your email) to remove stuff from cluttering up your email inbox.

Second, dedicate some time each morning to either act on your email or snooze on it until a particular time. I use fantastical and also things and create todos from them.

For stuff that’s shunted out of your inbox, review those periodically by subject. Do a deeper dive if something catches your eye.

You’ll get back to inbox zero.

Also, dedicate some time to curating your todo list. Don’t overschedule yourself, you’ll find a happy medium. Act on stuff instead of letting it pile up. It’ll make you feel good.

Next up, go through your password manager and figure out what accounts you really need, and either cancel the account or stick with it.

Also, look at your bank statement and see what you get auto-billed for. Cancel it if you don’t need it.

I also have a program on my Mac, hazel, that I use for tending to my desktop and download folders. If something is more than a day old, move it to a dedicated folder by file type.

Also, dedicate time to tending to your bookmarks and other digital assets.


I would focus on the things that cause problems (if there are any), and solve those. Just ignore everything else.

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.


The problem isn't with the amount of stuff you have, but the place - mentally and physically - you're putting it in. Organization starts by finding the dividing lines that let you deal with the things you are ready to deal with, which could mean boundaries of place(different workspaces), boundaries of time (scheduling), or boundaries of quality(sorting and filtering mechanisms).

And place actually ranks higher than you might first think: doing different things with different machines in different locations allows you "set and setting": you were inclined to work in a certain way, therefore you keep ending up in that place. From that you can engage with the particular philosophy of what your aims are with that tool or task. If you try to integrate it all together there's no point of release. Information is only the data that you find useful, and sometimes that means getting distance from it.

Time and filtering, in contrast, are more narrow ways of looking at it: that you will spend some number of hours doing "the thing" is only applicable to some kinds of labor, since many times what you actually need is a once a day check-in, an opportunity to start. And filters establish topical specialization; they help you push your investigation further, but they can be an effort to enforce, as the world defaults to chaotic interconnectivity.


If you’re up for a left-field idea… give yourself a 6 month free pass to keep doing exactly what you’re doing (so in your case that sounds like buying that extra storage!) but start collecting data on what you consume.

Don’t do anything manually, you’ll probably find it hard to track everything that way - but a script to parse your browse history (usually a sqlite file in your profile - and depending on browser you may be able to see sync’d history from other devices), your watch history in your video storage/streaming services, your # views of photos etc etc

See if you can enrich your metrics collection with the inevitable global variables of life (time of day you consumed something, what was the weather like, was that a work day, check the hours of sleep & exercise you had from your phone or wherever…)

Best case: you get to know yourself a little better.

I’ve done this twice now, first time was a complete waste of time. I learned nothing of value. Second time lead to me ditching a ton of podcasts, renewing my audible subscription but changing the types of books i get, it was also the turning point for coming off facebook for me, there were a bunch of really high value outcomes that second time.


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.


Inbox zero is a useless metric. You can do the same thing with Inbox 9999+ by just self filtering. Only looking at what you need to look at. Ignoring the fact that you have unread. Just reading the body snippet.

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.


Just a singular data point from my side, but is there a chance you may have AD(H)D or O(C)D? I likely have ADHD myself (official dx pending), and I also have a very similar "I'm interested in everything!" feeling. My inbox has ~4k mails, and I likely have 2k tabs open across different devices/browsers/OSes.

If this is the case, I'd recommend taking a long, hard look at the things you want, and what you'll regret if you don't do. I love the idea of an FPGA but I won't regret not knowing how to code for one. Though ironically I can hardly say much to you in my current situation without coming off as hypocritical.


Reduce your spending, to near zero, and switch to almost always just-in-time.

In my experience, todos and bookmarks grow because I assume that my future me will be more interested than my present me about some thing, and so I send it to him. The truth is that anything I don't have an actual drive in reading or doing _right now_, I won't have an actual drive either in the future.

If you don't need to fight the irrepressible urge to read or do something, let it go. Otherwise, read it or do it right now. Todos are there in the case you don't have the time right now.


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 :)


Todo list growing is okay. Only top 5 are relevant. Just have daily item to drop all that are outside top 10. Move timed events to calendar. Okay for bookmarks to grow infinitely - no obligation to complete.

Stop with FOMO mentality. That is prime problem. Trying to never miss out. Life is short and more things to do than not do. Maximize list of things to not do. Remove optionality. Just lying to yourself since not going to do it.

But key action items:

- Only top 10 on todo

- Snooze for inbox to moment of action

- Tasks to Calendar for moment of action

- Drop all else.

Life unchanged on outcome; better on morale; trust me


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 to enjoy - pick the bits you want and enjoy them, you will absolutely not get to everything.


I 2nd this so hard


Radically a) reduce AND b) organize these things. Take two weeks off (or similar), and stop EVERYTHING that comes in automatically from coming in automatically, but instead move feeds to bookmarks, so you can read these things IF YOU WANT. No newsletters (just bookmark the mainpages). Deactivate all notifications and alerts, unless your daily life depends on it.

Consume all open tabs, store important stuff in bookmarks and delete non-important things.

Take all your digital data and organize it properly, i'm using Apple Notes for all text infos (accounts, notes, ideas) and HDDs for storage (Movies, Music).

It's okay to have 5000 notes, if they are organized properly and OUT OF SIGHT. I have folder with subfolders just with recipes, places and cars I like, but it works fine. Use Folders!

Keep ONE "pinned" (Apple) Note on top, naming it TODO and just put everything that you REALLY have to do in there, work it down over the next weeks, no excuse. Get focus in your life. Spend your day doing this list, everything else is distraction.

Bonus: Remove everything from your smartphone that's not essential. Go berserk and delete the email app. No "incoming" stuff except real communication with real friends and family. No Slack, no email, no social media.

Bonus 2: Keep a clean computer: empty desktop, 1-2 tabs max, one task at a time, one monitor, one focus. Everything has it's place.

Bonus 3: Grab a friend or stranger and do this together, share your progress. This helps so much.

Be Marie Kondo, but with computers ;)


Hoarding is a fear, you may manage it with various techniques, but the simplest is to just face it by deleting everything. The status quo is already paradoxical - you have it all but can never use anything of it actually. Deletion would just admit the fact.

I’d add don’t delete things that are factually useful, like work/gym playlists or documentation bookmarks which you use weekly at least. But if you feel that creates another spiral, get rid of that as well.


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

<quote>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.</quote>

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.


Several months ago I got rid of 600+ browser tabs.

Well, not completely. Some 50 of them went to bookmarks.

But I'd say start deleting based on the following question: "am I willing to go through this link, with 100% of the attention needed to make use of it, in my free time later today?".

If you answer "no" then the chances are at least 90% that you will not want to next week, next month, next year.

I was hoarding so much virtual stuff and one day I just realized that I'll never consume it. I deleted at least 50% of my bookmarks and I almost don't touch them nowadays (I am also looking into deleting more of them in the future). I figured I'll very sparingly grow them and only when I am absolutely certain I'll need the content for my future work or hobbies.

And nowadays I have a private Telegram channel where I post things for review no more than a month from now. And I ruthlessly delete links from it if I haven't visited them in the last month. Think of it as a short-lived Kafka queue. :)

In the end it all boils down to how honest you are with yourself. So be more honest with yourself and you'll very easily find a way to get rid of the dead weight.


Accept that you’ll never get to it all. Let it flow away like a stream in a forest. Let it glide beyond the horizon like clouds across the ocean.

You’ll be fine.


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).


I have a couple to-do lists. But, I have one "master map" to-do list, with timelines, stretching out many years. I then have a "check this each day" to do list. Finally, my third to-do list, and the simplicity and power cannot be overstated, is a list that I completely erase no matter what at the end of the day. If there is something new on it that I really believe is important, it will go to the "check this each day" list, or if I'm putting it off, or if it is something further out into the future, onto the "master map" to-do list. My master to-do lists doesn't have to only be far out goals.

Each morning that I wake up, I look over my "check this each day" list, and make a list of everything I want done for that day on my third to-do list (the one that I delete all contents of at the end of the day, and leave a blank template). I have habitual habits labeled as "ritual 1" (such as waking up & eating & showering & hygienic stuff) and evening stuff labeled as "ritual 2", so that instead of writing all of those smaller tasks out that I do each day, I know in my head what they are when I see "ritual 1" and so forth. You can use other terms other than "ritual xyz".

Since I have began this process, my to-do lists have been much more manageable. The drawback I suppose is I look at my "master map" to-do list much less than I used to, although I do look it over from time to time to see how I'm doing.

For my journal I categorize everything inside of it. It is not as organized as it could be, but it gets more organized as time passes.

For my work, I use a centralized service. It is extremely organized.

Best of luck to you. I hope my suggestions are helpful, especially my to-do lists suggestion, because I believe a to-do list system like that is very helpful.


The first two things I would do is figure out why you have so many feeds and try to stop some of the consumption at the source and also organize the content you do have.

My first tip is to separate content consumption away from your work/daily driver phone. The way I do this is on my phone my open tabs are only new things I want to cook soon and HN. It lets me get just a little bit of content without algorithms addicting me.

Secondly I try to categorize my wishlist as milestones or personal goals. My rationale is if I’m able to achieve x then I can deal with distraction y in my life. It also lets me separate between things I want soon and eventually. I realize sometimes those things are just neat and I don’t want them a month or 6 after I first saw it. This periodically reduces my bookmarks while also being a good barometer of where I’m at in life now.


I can relate to your feelings.

Your suggestion are good. Perhaps a combination of them would be most effective.

However, often the problem isn't completely solved with a specific technique. I found that the growth of my inbound is just a symptom not the root cause.

To me, the root cause was not accepting the following fact:

I am a finite being, with finite time, living in a world with infinite possibilities. Regardless of how productive I am. I probably will miss on 999% of what the world has to offer. And that is OK.

By treating time as a resource that must be optimized. I found myself trying to fit in as much as possible. Which paradoxically sucked the joy out the very things I scheduled. Every thing became a chore.

I found much more helpful to practice being fine with the fact that I will be missing on most of the things out there. Afterwards, the productivity techniques magically became much easier to stick to.


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


Bankruptcy makes sense if you're paying interest. Just schedule some time to go through the backlog.


You need to read this:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159122/fourthousandwee...

Realise that you will NEVER catch up with anything. And even if, think about the amount of “new” things produced each minute.

New in “” because really, nothing is really new or exciting. I deployed the following strategy:

- Have a priority list (mine is: Health, Family, Friends, Creativity, Work)

- Based on this, make sure what needs to be done (workout, eat healthy, text or call a family member or friend, catch up on work-related news).

- Everything else comes afterwards. And if there is not enough time, it falls over and it’s fine, since it didn’t impact or matter to your overall wellbeing anyway.


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.


There is a limited amount of work in progress you can handle. The most basic process in management is to limit how much you commit to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban


For browsing I've given up on one for all, now I use different browsers (and profiles and Firefox containers) for different things.

There are browser launchers that can help with this strategy, though IME most don't route from within one browser to another. So I started my own [1].

For non-browsing stuff there are a lot of ways to organize things. Generally I like to try to isolate apps on my devices for work or personal since I have little overlap. On mobile some crossover may be unavoidable, though on Android one can make different Android profiles.

[1] https://paulrrogers.com/products/browser-routr/


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.


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.


A system needs a filter (what is allowed in) and then you need time to work that system, which can include sending things into downstream systems. The important thing is that then those downstream systems also need filters and also need to have time for working on them (and maybe further downstream systems). If you just send them into a downstream system (like a bookmark that you never use) then they will just pile up somewhere else.

In other words: https://fortelabs.co/blog/one-touch-to-inbox-zero/


This is digital version of hoarding!

I struggle with it too - I think a better tagging system would solve it for me but I’ve accepted I’ll never read all the books in my wishlist or even some I bought years ago and yet to read them.


Excellent comment! Same here, we are digital messies / hoarders. It's gets worse with OCD, as the feeling of having unread items gives me brain cancer.


What I learned from the COVID vaccine is that seeing something twice separated by frequency is a pretty good model for other things. So instead of bookmarking something the first time I see it, I make a mental note, and then the next time I see it, I go add a bookmark or learn more about that. For example, rqlite has been on my radar for a while. I heard about it, thought "that's neat" and promptly forgot its name. Then I saw it again, and decided "ok, I'll install it and see what it's like to interact with". Now I know it well, but if it never came up again, then I wouldn't bother knowing about it.

This technique doesn't work for everyone, of course, but it's how I stay sane.

For work-related interrupts; inbox, Slack, code reviews... I just do those immediately. If someone is blocked on me, I'm just throwing away money if I make them ask again a day later (since they are probably off to YouTube to chill out or something until I do the thing they asked). I find it very easy to jump back into something, even if I was in the legendary "flow state" at the time. (This is a skill you teach yourself, not an intrinsic aspect of your personality, I think.)

Finally, it's worth noting that you don't have to reply to your emails if you dont' want to. Just because someone wants something from you (your time) doesn't mean you have to give it to them. Too much of this, though, and people will stop talking to you. Maybe that's what you want, maybe that's not what you want. As with everything, there is a feedback loop and you are in control of whether it increases or decreases the volume of requests. (I suppose you can do this at work too. "If you don't want to be asked to do something, don't do a good job," they say. But, again, too much of that and you just get fired ;)


I’ve heard this natural-filter technique referred to as “time-shifting,” and it helps me a lot too. I’ll throw stuff I find on my “daily notes” page and rely on revisiting it later.


I can only answer for email, but mail rules are you friends. I have many rules that label, categorize, archive, delete, and mark things as important. Almost all automated emails (receipts, reminders, alerts, etc) skip my inbox entirely, so I only have to actually think about things people send to me directly. Everything else gets my attention either in scheduled slots (eg before a stand up, or at 10am, in the case of things like Gitlab or JIRA emails) or just when I've got some time (newsletters).

I'm not an organized person so I get a computer to do it for me.


Sounds like a job for Marie Kondo, organising consultant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo


Make time to cleanup and remove things that are unnecessary. Schedule this to make it a habit. You can clean up a surprising amount of unneeded/unnecessary things in only 30 minutes.


For tabs, IMHO the one world-changing plugin is Tree Style Tab [1]. The auto-grouping is already quite useful; on top, a little manual dragging and/or customization can go a long way. The lack of parity in the Chrome world pushed me further away from Chrome too (as a pleasant side effect).

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...


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 a month, I've only got about 10 articles in my Pocket account, all having been read on my Elipsa.


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.


I probably have over 10,000 items in Pocket. I say probably because I never actually open the app.


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


My principle gripes:

- I cannot search for tags.

- I cannot select tags in the Android client. Most especially, if I'm reading an article and want to cross-reference similarly-tagged articles, because that's what I'm interested in right now, I cannot.

- I cannot search by multiple tags simultaneously.

- I cannot readily edit tags in the Android client. For this and most other tag operations, the best thing to do is to pull up the Web client, manually enter the tag in the URL, then use the (relatively-recently-added) edit-tag function (usually to fix typos, etc.)

- The <backspace> key does not function on Android. It is not possible to use backspace to edit errors when entering tags.

- Suggested tag order changed earlier this year from a highly-weighted most-recently-used to collate order. Meaning when tagging a set of similar articles, input/entryis far more cumbersome.

- "Flip mode" pagination is fragile and broken. I'd prefer a pagination far more like Einkbro using touch zones rather than gestures.

- I cannot create or export a list of articles to export to myself or share with co-workers, friends, etc., of interest. Pocket could be an excellent references generator. It is not.

- There's no print-to-PDF feature from the Android app. (Einkbro's print-to-Epub is vastly more useful in this regard, as I've posted recently to HN.)

Pocket has added a search-in-page feature. That only took years. Still, it's forward progress. But given that my gripes list (see up-thread) is five years old, that's pitifully little to show for.


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.


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.


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. This reads as if you are in a zone of problems and locked in a decision-problem?


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/validate future information.


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.


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


There is nothing wrong with having many items. Tech is designed to scale. If your productivity apps can't keep up with your behavior, then it's time for an upgrade.


I would tend to agree, but two things still bother me:

1. My saved items live in 100+ different silos. If they all lived in one place, say some kind of self-hosted personal data store, I probably would be less concerned. I've started to consolidate as much as I could into a handful of ecosystems (e.g., Pocket -> Keep, Dropbox -> Drive, Airtable -> Sheets, Todoist -> Tasks, RSS -> Gmail digest, Zoom -> Meet) and it seems to help a bit.

2. There is no easy way to organize, sort, prioritize, schedule, or even search for these items. Related items should be clustered together. Large items should be summarized and/or broken down. Urgent items should reach my inbox, be prioritized and scheduled. Popular and highly-rated items should rise to the top. Saved items should appear at the top of my Google search results. Without that, they might as well not exist.


Then find a single unified storage option (I'd look at either your own solution using flatfiles or a database such as sqlite, or something along the lines of NextCloud), have redudant copies of that), and as you migrate data to it, close the origin accounts*.

1,000 individual services is at least 900 too many. Probably 990 too many.


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?


https://www.one-tab.com You're welcome. :)


I think the fundamental cause of the problem is actually the existence of other people: they tell new stories, perform new studies, and provide new opportunities, all of which result in a seemingly un-ending flood of tasks. My recommendation--if this is really bothering you--is thereby to limit your exposure to other people by whatever means necessary and then begin spending any resources you can spare on a campaign to prevent the spread of new people.


Honestly, if mine ever stops growing I'd question what was happening to me. I mean as far as saved links inside my bookmarking service go, I have thousands. I've managed to pair down emails by getting off most of the discussion lists I was on, yeah those do still exist in the niche I belong to. I'm also currently restarting my Miniflux instance from scratch, so pairing down feeds as well.


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.


Introduce artificial limits, e.g. 10 emails in inbox, 10 online accounts, 100 saved items, etc. And if you want to add new item, you'll have to cleanup some old ones to make space, either by archiving them to some sort of "deep storage", or just deleting. Very likely, that such limits might help you to find even better ways to organize everything, instead of constantly fighting them.


alternative: go for 0. But have an unlimited archive with important things.


I use a two todo lists (work and personal) each with two priority levels (now and backlog). Every night I prioritize the "now" tasks for the next day and also delete backlog tasks if I can.

Reduce your spending and reduce your backlog of saved items. If you need motivation to delete your personal backlog tasks, try hackernews "past" from 1/6/12 months ago or the equivalent.


I would say pay back the debt. Along the way you will find itmes that maybe are no longer of interest to you. This will reduce your list.


I have the same issue and I lost a very significant amount of time reading and organizing stuff which is very useful sometimes but also impact my ability to just do stuff.

One question that I'm making to myself is: what if I just delete everything? Worst case scenario nothing bad will happen. Less (stuff) generally is more (value).


I never understood the obsession with inbox zero. I treat my inbox like the HN front page. If a headline catches my eye, I click on it. Otherwise, it falls off and disappears and I forget about it.

I suppose for people whose job is replying to emails, I can see how a tidy inbox would be advantageous. But for the rest of us, why?


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


Move everything that you've been putting off dealing with for more than a year to a "some day/maybe" folder. You are welcome to inspect that folder at your leisure, and tackle items on it. Though since I created that folder 15 years ago, I never have.


I built a bookmark manager for myself as a place to archive links in case I ever need to reference back to them, and to allow me to close the tabs:

https://link.horse


for just the online consumption part, how about a specifically developed curriculum?

Most of humanity goes thru school and college relying on the fact that the multi-year programs are going be worth it - and it is. Schools and colleges have well developed curriculums (with inbuilt choice and variety also).

If we want to justify the time spent on forums like HN and internet in general, as being a source of new information and knowledge - but there isn't nearly enough effort to be make the internet an organized tool for learning. Else it really is just a time sink.

Edit - And as others have said, it seems inverted to approach it in-terms of "inbox zero". Think in terms of projects or tasks to be done - long, medium and short term.


I cull a topic that I never went further than collecting for. I export my bookmarks to dropbox, dated and labelled, then clean up the browser bookmarks. Same for notes, I have an unwanted ideas.txt, including reasons why they ended up unwanted.


What’s up, I read your blog regularly. Your writing style is witty, keep up the good work!

my web site …https://www.fiverr.com/share/qqp8qZ


1. Actively maintain lists when you use them. When you want to watch a movie and look back at your to-watch list, delete stuff! A lot of times you'll put something on a list because it struck you a certain way in the moment, but it doesn't really deserve its place. Be ruthless.

2. To-do lists come in two forms: a vital, nonnegotiable, long-lived list and ephemeral lists that serve you for a day or a week. Vital items: renew car registration, send wedding invites, find a primary care physician. Items for an ephemeral list: wash the car, schedule a meeting with Bob, try that new show somebody mentioned. Throw away the ephemeral list after its time has expired. Non-essential items can only be put on an ephemeral list, never the long-term list.

3. Don't treat stuff as precious if you discovered it by a simple web search. If you think "I should watch more French movies to maintain the French I learned in school" and Google "best French films of the 21st century," don't add any bookmarks or list entries for what you find. You can always do the search again. (No, you did not accomplish anything of lasting value by reading through the search results and picking the ones that appealed to you.)

4. Don't save things expecting them to change your behavior tomorrow. Don't think, "I keep thinking I should learn French. Maybe if I put some things on my to-do list...." Every day, the you that exists that day will make the decisions. Next Tuesday's you may or may not be smarter than today's you, but odds are that next Tuesday's you is not very interested in what today's you wants them to do. Only bequeath to them information they'll actually value and use.

5. Use a service like Pocket to bookmark articles. I use Pocket, and it's great because I only see it if I go to it, and it gives me no indicator of how many articles I've saved. I can scroll back if I want to, I can search in my articles if I want to, I can tag them... but I don't have to do any of that.

6. Make Inbox Zero a regular hygiene task. Getting to Inbox Zero every day is pretty hard-core. Getting to Inbox Zero every month is not so bad.

7. Unsubscribe from everything. You will find so much stuff by seeking it out that you'll have no time to consume it all. Why, on top of that, would you add things coming to you passively?

8. Declare bankruptcy on non-essentials. Do go back and check for things you really should take care of, like tax paperwork and out-of-the-blue emails from friends you haven't seen in ten years.


Answered a somewhat similar questions before, hope you find it useful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641406.


I have this issue and I think the only fix is to stop reading / consuming


1. Accept that you are a hoarder. 2. Stop hoarding. For example, stop bookmarking. Just accept that either you read somethig or you let it slip into the void of everything you'll never read.


Came here to say this sounds like hoarding behavior. To OP: do you also have problems accumulating physical things, organizing them, being unable to discard anything?

For your online stuff, I'd do a mass delete of anything over 90 days old (or pick some other cutoff). You just have accept what's already obvious: you're never going to go through all of it, so why keep it?


If you haven’t used it in 6 months get rid of it. Use this principal for everything in life.

Of course with the exception for certain documents such as birth certificates, tax records (until mandated), etc..


I have accepted the chaos. Be one with the chaos of the universe.

I rarely delete email and files or close tabs. I come up with some inefficient but workable system to find what I need.


Very interesting. Seems we are similar :D

What I didn't understand: How is the growing list of things stressing you out? Do you feel pressured to do something with the items?


It's pointless accumulation and hoarding, and eventually becomes disorganized, which can be some degree of.stressful to deal with.


This is it for me.

I'm a librarian, so I'm AWARE each time I look at my dumping grounds that I should organize them. Of course, that also feels like work, so then I don't do it.


Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

You can also delegate, eg. stop reading and use some keyword-based alerts so your feed quality increases.


When it comes to emails and files, sort by size. You can delete 10k tiny files and make less of an impact than deleting one or two large files.


I've just started to index everything and then search it as I need it rather than spend time organizing. File storage is pretty cheap so it was the least expensive of all the options

I also made a chrome extension that would show similar saved items to whatever is currently open in my tab, which also ended up working well when I forgot what I had indexed.

It worked surprisingly well for me personal use, so now am trying to sell it as a product https://www.diva.so

Disclaimer: am a cofounder for Diva.


Absolutely declare bankruptcy. You'll realize it's different from dying and come through a better, more self-aware person.


Delete the things you don’t actually want to do


I use usehappen.com to archive saves/bookmarks and upcoming events. It's saved me an enormous amount of stress.


Digital Hoarding is a real thing. I suggest reading up on how hoarders stop hoarding and apply them to your digital life.


I use email aliases so different sourced emails drop into separate inboxes, makes life easier.


Maybe i am weirdly unorganized, but i think TODO lists of any sort, are useless and a complete waste of time.

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.


apply composting and have things rot to obliviance.

Do timed purges after various timeouts and keep only printouts 'forever'. Just a thought, however.


this was great. i now have 5 more tabs open. thx


There is only so much you can do, or will do.

The things that you're not going to be able to do will be eliminated from your list regardless of your choice(s). The question is whether you do this deliberately or incidentally with time.

David Allen's Getting Things Done isn't a perfect system, and has flaws. That said, it's quite good, and is better than virtually anything else I've seen. I strongly recommend it.

In an era of information abundance, what is limited is what information consumes: attention. (Thank Herbert Simon for that observation.)

The other thing information consumes is time, and no matter how much technology improves, you have only 24 hours, 14,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds in a day.

Ultimately, where information exceeds capacity to process it, what is needed is fast, cheap, and guilt-free disposal. Elminiating obligations without having to think about it, and without regret.

There are 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,765 hours in a year (roughly 2,000 of those are spent at work, sleep, and everything else, respectively).

An 85 year lifespan is roughly 1,000 months, 4,500 weeks, 31,000 days, 750,000 hours.

Think of the things that you do once a week, or once a month. Do you read a book a week? You'll read at most 4,500 in your lifetime. If you've stacked up more than 4,500 books, either you're going to need to pick up the pace ... or you're going to leave most of them unread. Perhaps you'll only read a few sections of each. If not books, than games, videos, movies, articles, etc.

My suggestion is either to consciously select for quality, or to extract the most you can from what you do gain access to. Preferably some mix of both.

Few of the most excellent works of all of human history were written in the past 24 hours. FOMO is an exceedingly misleading anxiety.

Your time here is limited.

Yes, you need to cut back.

If you have a partner or someone you trust to help you with this, include them.

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

Eliminate as much of your current committments as possible. If you can't do so by a rational method:

- Elminiate by classes of accounts: entertainment, little used, media, etc.

- Eliminate by least used.

- Eliminate at random.

- Cut everything. Re-add those which turn out to have been useful.

The last approach is drastic, but surprisingly effective.

Yes, cut your discretionary spending. While you're at it, see if you can increase your income as well. Times may be tightening, but it has been a competitive labour market.

I'd suggest limiting additional storage until you can do better with what you have. Though the notion of ever-additional storage and never deleting anything is an information technology vision that seems increasiongly likely.


just save more and use lossless compression


Well... in terms of todos... Or they are done or they are simply procrastinating, there is nothing that can help if they are real TODOs, otherwise are just wishlists that normally grow and that's nothing wrong with such growth, instead they might hold informational value for your ancestors if they recover some useful ideas in a more or less far future.

In IT terms you simply feel IMVHO the lack of desktop operating environments, like classic Xerox or LispM, witch means systems designed to be user-centric instead of service-centric a small example:

- if ALL banks/financial institutions just publish a public OFX feed you can subscribe with your own desktop tools, with legal value since any entry is digitally signed by the bank AND any dispositive operation is also signed by you (before) and the bank (after) you'll have MUCH LESS work to do to handle your finance: anything will appear in the same place, with the same UI you like, with a common auth mean etc AND also banks have much less crap to produce, maintain and hosts for their porcals (portals are another thing);

- IF we have a unified payment method for taxes, federated of course, we have far less overhead in paying pretty anything but divide et impera means profit for those who offer a specific payment service, a specific UI/service etc;

- IF we only have FLOSS classic desktops for the modern world we will have our own end-user automation and ANYTHING will be simpler;

IF, if, if, if. The point is simple: tech is a tool, can be developed for a purpose and being more or less effective for such purpose. Actual tech have a purpose mostly AGAINST users for profits of a little cohort, so we feel frustration and issues. That's not a tech issue, that's a social issue and correcting it demand decades of (missed/lost) development and social push in that direction witch means awareness.

Personally I have almost-zero inbox thanks to Emacs (notmuch, fetchmail, maildrop under EXWM) witch makes some things quickly: noting things in org-mode via org-roam to access quickly "my personal semantic Google search" with org-attached files and easy elisp automation just to generate the right text in the right place I cut many time doing many things because almost anything run far quicker and friction-less, anything is at my fingertips. Unfortunately being a not-so-developed territory that's work after a certain time investment AND until something changes radically. For instance in the recent past I've invested few hours in few days to automatically:

- see certain mails in my inbox, the ones from my main voice/data carrier;

- extract the attached pdf bill (maildrop pipes to uudeview)

- rename the attached files (pdfgrep-ing the invoice numbers and due date)

- add an entry in my relevant note (a note per contract with subheadings per any bill, with invoice number, date, amount, status etc

- alert me via org-agenda if after few days post the due date from my ledger the relevant entry is not appeared

than a day my main carrier decide to send just empty mails asking for logging-in in it's porcal to manually download the bill. Sure they want some proof I've received the message, perhaps a clickable dedicated links suffice for them in tech terms and legally have the same ZERO value (in my country, a log entry from someone who say I'm logged in have no value since there is no neutral third party that certify some fact) but as a result I've wasted my time automating. Than I tried woob to automate the web part, it works, unfortunately they like to change their porcal often witch means breaks my automation.

That's the point: our IT development is NOT DONE for us humans citizens and as a result we can do something to compensate but we can't solve the issue alone. We need to unite and IMPOSE a human-centered IT and society, something that have happen in the past, but it's very unlikely now.

Now probably we can just try to be part of a small élite that it's united and do things for themselves. For instance ALL banks quality is evolved from bad to worse, but private banks, at least some, at least if you are good enough for them, still works enough, they are a liability since they are few and far bigger than their typical customers but they still function while the rest do not.

My suggestion is simple: in IT terms try to rediscover tools from the past, they have age issues, but they are far more modern and advanced than modern one, just look at https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k for a quick showcase than decide if invest the needed amount of time to learn and implement your own desktop environment to help YOU not some third party data-and-money-munging service...


my work inbox is by nature of my job is some sort of email hydra; if I take out one thread, 10 more appear. This is kind of a blessing/curse of always-on communication and instant connections in that you can drown yourself in them, and in fact, some like it that way. Edit: Forgot to write how I handle this -- for actual emails I need to check, just careful filters (with a backup of the filters) helps me and I can more rapidly figure out which folders need attention when they have badges, which can sit, and which is the "quick check" (general inbox). The benefit for me is I can shift context a lot better -- items in my Team's DL folder I pay high attention to, general reports I relegate to "when I have time/need", Boss emails get high attention always (one of my few "must be 0" folders), and the rest are just held until the next coffee break and and browsed over a coffee.

Comparing it to finance I think is actually a risky thing as you have an obligation with finances (debt), but you don't necessarily have an obligation to all the items in your inbox. First step is allow yourself to acknowledge this. The world won't end if you don't answer some items or if you don't happen to watch a unique one-of-a-kind youtube video.

I used to digitally horde when I was in University because bandwidth was a commodity and I never knew if I'd ever have a chance to see certain movies or play certain games again. I kept multiple 50 disk spindles of Wii and GCN games I knew I would never play because I was just so into the process of using my modded Wii that the process was the attraction, not the actual games themselves.

Eventually, I just fell into minimalism naturally. Moving cross country and emigrating helped a bit here as it changed my priorities from "hoard as much as possible" to "why the hell did I buy a novelty bottle opener in the first place?" as my needs changed.

With reading, realize that a lot of it is garbage and learn to filter good sources from bad ones. This is regrettably easier said than done, but it's an old university habit I learned because necessity (read: laziness) meant I needed to find premiere papers fast and sort good sources rich with information from bad ones.

For articles in particular, I ended up just taking a long look at the articles I came back to and found the style that resonated with me the most and that I felt had the biggest impact on the way I think. Challenging articles with good logical thought processes that advanced my thinking or articles on subjects I was not familiar with but knew enough to start on really got my interest and typically are my clicks on sites like HN. I avoid too many content aggregators, especially ones with heavy focus on karma/upvotes/whatever as the metric is perverse towards interesting content in my opinion and more just interested in adding content to get the reward. I use other content aggregators like Instagram, but very sparingly as I just don't feel the need to keep on top of tons of trends; if it hits one of the few sites I check regularly, it means it's a premiere meme or topic and usually I can spend a few minutes researching on my own to figure out what's up.

I shifted to become a creator of my own; my own code, stories, writing just for me, videos, etc, and it changed the way I viewed content available. Once I started making my own things with my mind and hands, suddenly I didn't feel so compelled to watch others do the same. It's one part arrogance I guess and one part freedom. (e.g., I used to really be into FoodNetwork even to the point of getting into reality shows. I told myself it was to learn to cook, but I never ever did it. Then I just started doing it, first for myself so that my mistakes were private, and once I thought "eyyyy this was an alright meal", I started to share it with friends and family, and sure enough, even my mistakes were happily eaten. Ugly but tasty)

If you're going to use one of your options, I'd say go with bankruptcy. Just like how a spring cleaning is therapeutic once you work up the will for it, so is cleaning out your digital footprint. I've been working from MacBook Airs since 2012 (2 of them in fact! 2012 and 2019, and the 2012 is still kicking with a friend who needed a new laptop), so I got very used to a small digital foot print fast. I kept only the pictures I really treasured and felt an immediate emotional response to each time I check them, and realized that the rest were like any other fad, and my attraction passed.

Clean out what you have and do the great purge. The first one hurts and you might have a few false starts while you wait for the right moment with the motivation to clean, but once you hit that moment, you ought feel a lot of stress and weight lifted off of you.


Reduce your spending




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