Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?
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)?
132 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
1,000 individual services is at least 900 too many. Probably 990 too many.
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.