Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

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TEN THOUSAND? And I thought I was bad, I have a couple hundred.

You have to set aside a block of time to go through them and categorize them and be honest: I have one lifetime. Will I ever really use this?

There is a threshhold on diversification of your focus, beyond which you will ruin any chance you ever had of accomplishing anything.

Figure out what you really want to learn and accomplish. I've found that as I understand the fundamentals better and have a comfortable workflow, checking out cool new stuff doesn't seem so necessary.

I keep a lot of personal information organized. I go thru bookmarks about once a week and move them to text notes. Something I want to learn? It goes into an anki flash card. General reference? Goes into my markdown notes, or I might edit the appropriate Wikipedia aricle instead. Helpful for a side project? Toss it the project readme for later.

I also use something like Trello (zenkit) to keep a long list of "maybe never" projects where I can toss cool stuff I'll probably never get into. These may be organized as well, so if I see something cool about say, game programming in C, I can toss it into the existing maybe never game coding project note.

Also, if I have unread bookmarks that can be understood/used without coding, I read them on the go with my phone as much as possible.

Organize them into folders. All of them, with no exceptions. Having to take an action on each one will lead to removing many. Hoarding is a symptom of procrastination.

Links rot over time.

That's why I stopped bookmarking and started notebooking. Evernote as a personal knowledgebase.

Why do you feel you need to change this habit? The only thing I think needs changing is the bookmark management system. I also have a ton of bookmarks. They serve as a sort of personal search engine. I just wish the bookmark manager would actually index the pages so that I can search through content as well. (I also want it to be FLOSS and self-hosted. None of this proprietary Cloud SaaS stuff that can go away at any moment)

And as someone else said, link rot is a real issue. mostly alleviated for me by Archive.org + an extension. But actually saving the pages would be better.

Tag and release.

I use Pinboard and have 6.5k links saved. I bookmark things not to come back to them, but so I can get them out of my browser and off my mind. I tag things as they go in (the auto-suggested tags make this fast), and I don't stress about whether I'll ever look at them again. Then if later I find I do want them, they're just a quick search away. And indeed, I do come back and dig things out with some frequency.

(This is a piece of the GTD mindset, but since it's digital it's effectively free--no file cabinet full of folders you have to sort through.)

Try to read and take notes (I do it on paper) as you find new things. Shelving things for the future is futile and I have stopped. The really good stuff gets sent to instapaper and starred with an appropriate tag.

I used to have the same problem(, I still have).

I had accumulated over a thousand bookmarks and was having trouble deleting them. "I want to learn {subject} some day, so cannot lose this article". Related was the issue of not able to close my browser because I easily can have 30+ tabs open at the same time. Again the same fear, don't want to lose track of that new article on ML.

Something that helped me relieve the pain a lot was to start using OneTab extension for Chrome. OneTab allows me to close tabs without feeling guilty. OneTab keeps track of the links so that I have a way of getting them back if required, and at the same time - it removed the necessity for me to bookmark them individually and organising them and obsessing over them.

So in the end, I still keep the links around in OneTab, but I have found that it is much better for my stress levels that having to hoard the links in my main (chrome) bookmarks.

Maybe you should try only bookmarking things that you can successfully write a paragraph about.

Why is it significant? What did it make you think about or feel? How would you like to use it?

TLDR: a few bookmarking management tricks and accepting some basic truths about my bookmarking habits has really helped me.

I used to spend a lot of time organizing and metadataing my bookmarks - this was back in the day when I used Opera, which had better bookmarking capabilities than Chrome - but stopped once I realized I never clicked on most bookmarks and that I was just wasting time and causing myself anxiety because I had hundreds of links that I was supposed to explore in my todo folder.

Today I just use Chrome's built-in bookmark manager to handle 50-100 bookmark across three folders:

* "tools", "articles": these are references that I use frequently enough that I want to be able to find them through the address bar. I almost never bookmark articles because I know that I can always find stuff thru google (I have maybe only 20 articles bookmarked). Also, Chrome's internal search engine is so mediocre that it often fails to find bookmarked articles so why bother in the first place. It really helps me to remember that content curation on the web is so fine grained and available for the most specialized topics that I know I can get high quality links collections on any topic imaginable because even my very specific problems, questions and curiosities are shared by millions of people.

* "todo": this is just a collection of articles, clips, movies and music that I couldn't fully explore in a minute or two when I first stumbled upon the link. If a bookmark has been in this folder for more than a few weeks, I just delete it. Truly good content tends to be shared and re-shared by millions of people so nothing worthwhile disappears on the web.

I declare bookmark bankruptcy every several weeks by doing a hard reset after exporting all my bookmarks from Chrome and deleting all the bookmarks except the ones in the toolbar (the ones I really use). Next, I email that bookmark file as an attachment to myself in Gmail and a filter puts it in a bookmarks folder. Usually, if I am searching for something and can find a couple keywords in the title, the bookmarks attachment is found in the Gmail search and then the actual bookmark can be found by viewing the entire bookmark file.

I use Evernote rather than bookmark, which you get organized with nothing but folder structuring. It's totally hard to manage, validate, and find when you want to.

Evernote, on the other hand, provides a creative means: taking a note on your own way. By creating a Notebook and a Note, you can give a brief statement of the linked articles, which could come in useful for later full-text search.

Here's something that has worked for me - before bookmarking, decide if the article is something you need in the immediate future (within the next couple of days) or is it something that you might need to refer to at some later date.

If it is something you need now, email yourself that article [1], send it to your kindle [2] or save it to a separate board on Trello. Delete it once you are done with it.

For the second case, use an app like Pocket or Instapaper [3].

[1] https://www.emailthis.me

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle

[3] https://www.instapaper.com

I use https://getpocket.com as a "bookmarks manager", which offers some additional features over your standard browser bookmarks menu. Basically, you store articles in a personal queue and can archive them when you're done, and everything is searchable.

One way to think of this is that being a "digital hoarder" is way less destructive than being a physical one. Digital storage is cheap these days. You don't need to remove any bookmarks (or "saved articles" as Pocket calls them), since they'll just be "old articles at the back of the queue, which may be interesting to browse sometime in the future, but if I'm not interested I'll just ignore them and look at the front of the queue instead, since the stuff I've saved recently more likely lines up with my current interests."

Pocket also suggests recommended articles for you to read (which I suppose could just add more stress to your system) but I've often found their recommendation algorithm to be pretty good.

Don't worry about the bookmark collection you already have. There's no pressure to read through it and no pressure to throw it away. That's the great thing about a digital hoarding habit -- it doesn't fill up your house and disrupt your life like physical junk would.

If you're concerned about the time you spend scanning through HN and creating the bookmarks in the first place, what you should do is replace that activity with something else. Concrete example: I decided to eat less junk food, and the way I did it was by filling the fridge with healthy foods which I could eat whenever I got the urge for a snack. It's much easier to replace than abstain.

I set up Firefox so that the url bar autocompletes only from my bookmarks. And since years I've been constantly and linearly bookmarking. When something has an outstanding feature, I add a/some tag/s. I maintain areading list in Org mode but I plan to move it to Firefox as bookmarks tagging them as "unread". Maybe I can make a little extension that will add a button to tag them so automatically, and list them in a popup. For retrieval I haven't ever needed anything else than just searching from the url bar.

It's okay that you won't ever return to them. Because one day you'll want to retrieve a specific one and then you're better off with an excess of bookmarks among which what you were looking for, than having an organised list but without what you're searching.

If you are spending toi much time chasing new links on reddit, what works for me is to limit my sources (hn and reddit only for me) and sometimes to have an offline week, proving myself that I can live without being on the top of everything.

I hear you. I am almost up to 18k bookmarks. Not bragging either. Classification becomes increasingly difficult. However, I can rcmd a couple/few helpful plug-ins...

Mainstay:

[Use Chrome Extensions (or similar add-ons/apps in alternative browsers)]

0.) Search Bookmarks (Enables searching your bookmarks from Omnibox; type b-m-space in your omni and then term(s)/keyword(s) for the bookmark(s) you are searching for... they will appear in the suggestion drop-down... or, press return to search bookmarks using Chrome Bookmark Search, which will match the term(s) you've entered): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-bookmarks/m...

Two other worthwhile mentionables:

1.) Bookmark My Tabs: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-my-tabs/d...

2.) OneTab: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

You may find this very abstract but from my experience I think it also boils down to what your life priorities are. Having clear understanding of your horizons of focus, as referred in GTD [1] will help in sorting out what is important to you and what is not.

I find it also important to maintain a wont-do list of things that are not important to me (and I thought they were).

Ex: I thought running marathon was important to me. Turns of semi-regular to gym is what is important to me. So any link/article related to marathon, extreme workouts/fitness that I come across is glanced and closed peacefully.

I think this will help you let go bulk of links without causing anxiety. HTH.

[1] http://gettingthingsdone.com/2011/01/the-6-horizons-of-focus

You are a digital hoarder.

My advice: Delete it all. If you need it bad enough, you'll find it again. It's digital.

With 10K+ bookmarks you'll never organise it.

An alternative (but imo too hard with 10K+) use some kind of hoarding 'zen' approach - look at the link - if it brings you an emotional response - keep, else delete.

I made a lot mind maps and then a search engine to solve this. It has been working pretty well so far. :)

Here is the search engine : https://learn-anything.xyz/

If you want to research something in the future, what makes you think your collection of bookmarks will be better than a reading list you find / create on the spot?

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

Xmarks is a great app to save them.

I also have thousands of bookmarks I rarely look into or use. BUT when I do go through them, I'm happy and find interesting stuff I'm glad I did go back through...so I'd say save away the great stuff, just like you save great photos.

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

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

I have 10872 links inside pinboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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