I tend to associate the information I hoard with knowledge, which I equate to fuel to develop my efficiency. It’s actually the opposite. I rarely lack the extra bit of information and more often loose track of what really matters. I resonate with this article.
I resonate with the article as well.
There seems to be too many interesting things for the curious minds. Perhaps, it has always been like this.
Nothing bad with curiosity - I think it's quite the opposite, it's a great thing. I found that for me though, it needs to be balanced, and I learned to not feel bad if I can't check or read everything I want.
There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links below).
The biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself, is not information, it's "data."
There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
Information is what you derive from the data. It's your summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you make between a thing and some other thing you previously recorded.
Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily create those connections, and that's very much based on the zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now allows, which is more complex and nuanced.
Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.
That's different from how I understood his comment!
There is no point in hoarding links; this is just "information." Information by itself is not useful; we need "data" instead.
To turn this information into data, you could use something like Zettelkasten. Instead of hoarding links to articles, hoard notes about these articles and link them together.
Basically, stop hoarding links due to your FOMO. Actually read articles that interest you and learn from them by writing your thoughts.
> I like seeing what people are working on, but there’s too much information and I have a small problem with that.. While it’s manageable to read through a smaller batch of 30-40 links, it’s time-consuming and overwhelming when the number grows to 80+ in a single week.
The author writes his problem very clearly: he doesn't have time to go through the links.
Suggesting that he not only goes through the links but also writes a Zettelkasten note about it is simply ridiculous.
I'm not saying that the original comment is wrong, just that it's completely off topic and presents something as a solution when it's actually just a bigger problem.
The autor mentions that they are spending a huge amount of time on hoarding links. This is a waste of time. They should stop doing this, instead spend that time on reading a few articles and writing notes.
Why should they start spending time on writing notes on links, even if it requires looking at less links to make the time for it? It's really not obvious that writing notes habitually is good advice or a healthier use of time
Yo, be kinder. Don't accuse people of x, y or z. It's unnecessary. Chill out, and if you're in a bad mood, don't post inflammatory comments on the internet. Peace.
> There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links below).
I think sometimes we can overweight the impact of tools and systems for retaining knowledge. These tools can be useful (I'm working on my own home grown versions of them) and I am getting better with the systems as I get more practice. But, still, this is a race you can never win. As you digest more information, you consume more.
Eventually you've got to get out there and be a maker.
Came to say this as a light user of Obsidian. I don't think "hoarding" information is a bad habit. These are potentially bad habits:
A) Allowing yourself to be distracted by useless information
B) Under-organizing (or over-organizing) the information you collect
The OP may over-collect pieces of information that aren't important (URLs of random things that are novel) and may not spend enough time adding context to what he collects (e.g. via notes in a tool like Obsidian).
I find the ideas behind zettelkasten very useful. Our brains are not able to remember everything of value, therefore it is worthwhile to invest a little energy in an external or "second brain" where information is stored with some degree of organization for future retrieval.
I have a cache of notes on all manner of subjects going back about a decade. I only recently discovered Obsidian and have been gradually linking those notes together, adding context etc. This has had a real impact on my understanding of certain topics because I've re-discovered insights and knowledge of many things I had simply forgotten.
> so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
This is key.
If you didn't choose the right words, it could be lost forever.
I gave lots of tools a go. Really really tried. Logseq was one of them. Eventually, it had too many features I didn't need, and needed me to be too careful about how I input text.
I've settled on using about 200 plain text notes based on different subjects. And I use my bookmarks as a knowledge graph.
What I am waiting for is a killer-app bookmark manager with very powerful search, and tagging. Maybe some way to import into a tool like Logseq. FLOSS of course.
In the last few years I came to understand that the main difference between "hoarding" and "collecting" is "having stories attached" (though my context for that was retrocomputing hardware in particular.) Just in the last week I went through about 300 tabs and either discarded them or put them in logseq, with notes about why I care (or at least grouped with others, so I can go back to a topic and find them specifically. chrome tab-groups had not been helpful for this.) It took a bit to realize that I was applying the same principle...
Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.
This resonates. I've managed to control this behaviour a bit (or at least lessen the impact on my life) by just reconciling that there are link dumps for each specific purpose:
- Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just trawl through my starred repos.
- Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere (and if it does, problem solved!)
- Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with links to other key information I already have in there, or as the root of a new bundle of nodes.
The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone. The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly.
Goodreads and its “Want to read” shelf is good for this approach with books. I just add any book I see someone recommending to that list then when I need a new book to read I can pick from there. The ratings on there are handy for sanity checking if a book is worth your time. I’ve found anything with a score of 4.0 or above is usually worth a read.
> I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly while I've been reading and not doing (this is part of the procrastination on starting many of those projects).
Sounds like you are maintaining and extending your own frame of reference. I feel like a note that is never read again is not necessarily a wasted effort.
I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone share.
That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the "damn, where have i read that again?"
It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor docs anyway =)
It can easily be just a habit. I had the same habit as OP before, at some point I used to collect tabs stopped at 500 or so. Then I began collecting links and info in markdown. Many people go even further, they set up automation on top of notion, twitter bots and what not.
Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2 days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it anymore.
But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO, but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast partially solved for now.
Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more information out there as said by one of the comments.
I email links to myself for topics that I am actively working on or researching (or planning on researching). Most languish unread in my inbox but every once in awhile I search for that article I saw a couple of month ago about, eg, building your own C compiler…
I wouldn’t mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from my curated list of articles I’ve archived in this manner!
I've blocked most news websites, in the last decades the only "Big World" news that I really needed were communicated to me by others almost immediately (9/11, oncoming catastrophic storm, lock-downs).
When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-friendliness, not more.
Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The interests of the media in representing information do not match my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.
Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.
I do something similar, and in my case it is apparently a result of ADHD/ASD, but that's not why I'm here. I installed the OneTab browser plugin fairly recently because I tended to keep open "too many" tabs across multiple devices for various reasons. And I'd use it, and all my tabs are "closed and bookmarked and filed away", and then a short while later I've got dozens of tabs open again. In most cases, I've actually read these and I'm expecting to continue using the content in some manner.
So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.
That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).
I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,
to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. for example i have one for technical references, various research topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre curious, its open source!
Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get together and create a public index of all that content. You could call the site yoohoo or something ;-)
I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product. Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used.
StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love to have it back, particularly if the contents could be curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")
If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as when you're adding your thousandth note then such services will stop dying out.
The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no money to be made in this type of website. These sites come and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.
Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and positive sum, I think.
And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?
Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose (cached version of content, super smart search function not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like for bitwarden.
Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against the growth of that network.
Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.
I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.
Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - if you get enough network effects, there must be some way to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that this is not the case.
Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even loosely organizing a lot of information.
Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for researchers. This was in the early era of social networking as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public tagging.
Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article again based on what I remember from it.
This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.
Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...
Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."
In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search".
Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".
It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".
--
[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history?
I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.
OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.
Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing necessarily. Might I suggest checking out https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the browser extension.
There is likely no single good answer. Personally I break the issue into the long and short term. Long term (100s 1000s of years) the answer seems somewhat obvious. Preservation of information can be useful to future generations. Short term our societies are experiencing rapid change. Many things are built and soon discarded based on factors other than utility. So preserving the knowledge is useful for the minority of people that found those things useful. Also there is intentional mass truth distortion amplified by technology occurring. Preservation of the original sources of information is the first line of defense against it.
Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life.
I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be safely forgotten.
I don't know if you use firefox and tree-style tabs (unlikely, but far more likely here than anywhere else.) If you do, there's an extension for tree-style tabs (an extension for the extension) called "Fade Old Tabs." It allows you to color tabs based on how long it's been since they were accessed. You do this by setting a age range for tabs to be painted gray. Tabs not accessed since the beginning of that range are panted dark gray, and tabs accessed after the range are not colored at all.
So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a month, you'll see them and it might make a difference in your habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.
Thank you for sharing "Fade Old Tabs". I have the same problem with OP and have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows. That is after a big purge I did earlier this year where it was 2000+. Tree Style Tabs crashed a lot before but it has been quite good in recent memory.
I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in itself to fix.
Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.
does research get you to have so many open? How do you manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.
I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and use the discussions/issues to just continually post links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format.
Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.
I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.
I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.
Doesn't work for me, Firefox restores tabs from before restart. I could turn it off, but it invariably comes helpful for when Firefox (or the PC) crashes.
My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:
WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.
I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.
I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. It's simple but something I use many times every day.
I end up not managing it at all and it becomes a second brain. Links also rot when revisiting to recall info which is another problem. I use % in the address bar to find the tab what I'm looking for.
I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.
Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.
Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!
People have hundreds of tabs open at the same time?? I get anxiety if it goes above 12 or 15... The times when I just close them all and start opening firefox with no previous tabs are so relieving to me.
I have started opening new windows based on tasks; everything related to that task is on that window. Once the task is done, I close the window so all the tabs go with it. Quite satisfying to close a window with 30-40 tabs. Chrome also allows naming windows so I name each window according to the task.
I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs, the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall it. And then I keep hoarding.
I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated.
...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in.
In case anyone else is looking into browser options, I can't recommend https://arc.net/ more highly. I never thought I'd move away from Chrome, but then again, I never considered that they'd gather so much users that they can't make fundamental UX improvements any more without massive friction.
Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized. Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces" are the killer feature for me.
Am I seeing this correctly that arc.net doesn't provide any information about this supposed super browser at all and instead just links to a sign-up form where I need to provide my email address? Yeah, no, not doing that.
It hasn't been released officially yet, only as an invite-only preview so I don't think they mind if they turn away users at this point that don't know what they're getting into (an alpha). There are plenty of youtube videos if you're curious about the actual features.
Arc definitely has some features that I really like. Wish they would've released it on other platforms too as I'm not always using my Mac for everything that I do day-to-day.
i'd be interested in how many are dead links now. i'm nowhere near (hovering around 500 at the moment) and when i frequently do a healthcheck i see that most are already dead. are you archiving (using archive's wayback machine or something?) to ensure they're alive when you need them? for some definition of need lol
Please export the tabs, before one tab crashes on you. I’m amazed you made it till 24k without it crashing, low-k tabs are enough on my laptop to crash it. (Though my laptop is from 2015 so that might also factor in.)
What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full well I'll never, ever look for most of them again...
It's an comfort blanket.
I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
My hope at this point is for some AI to analyze my 75.000+ links and tell me what I may have forgotten which I should really be aware of, and give me a summary of it. Possibly even let me know if new discussions on certain technologies have been trending currently on topics which I Ve dealt with.
Interesting idea.... I have been idly working on an web crawler / indexing / organizing system that uses NLP etc to sort of solve the OP's problem(s) - if you don't mind, could you send me an email about your needs? See my HN account for contact info.
I got over tab hoarding by adding a shortcut to onetab to archive the current tab. Now I freely archive the tabs knowing it’s recoverable, problem solved for me.
The benefit is this: every job has it’s own window.
Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in “production/building” mode the default is consuming. This setup merely helps heighten awareness to the fact.
I do the same, but right now I just keep tabmanager.io on my right screen to show a grid of all my windows. Some which I save for later, e.g. switching between projects.
700 open tabs... Try 7000.... I have tabs all the way back from 2014 open right now on one of my firefox instances (probably have ~15 Firefox windows open across devices rn) which I have migrated between multiple machines along with my user profile, and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now.
I have 272x tabs open, 170x in my main window. I have been using Tab Session Manager to save and then close windows. Try it, you can always restore the window later.
(the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha)
Tab Session Manager is essential, as all of us Firefox users know how bad Firefox is at randomly trashing your tab sessions. I've nearly given myself a heart attack a few times over the years.
> and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now
I feel this deeply
The compromise I found was just to dump them into my bookmarking service. If I really really need to find that thing again, it's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab.
I think the zero inbox folks would have a heart attack. Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long!
I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll also never read.
I keep zero inbox at work as much as I can and have a couple of hundred tabs open on various desktops (91 tabs on this mobile alone; far more on desktop).
To me they're just different organisational methods that work well in different contexts.
I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so that you could browse history of those separately. It could also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for example.
Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can tell, cannot be even browsed by date.
> it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing ... while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
This really spoke to me - I find it to be a really positive way of framing the frustration I often feel with myself when I just can't get focused on work. Because at the end of the day, the clicking through links or reading up on something tangential to the result I want is driven by the same things that make me want to be creative in the first place.
I recently read The Millionaire Fastlane - which is a book I have seriously mixed feelings about - but one of the things that I thought was good in it was the advice to focus on being a producer rather than a consumer. I like this framing of the dichotomy, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Being productive is important, though. The Billionaire Fastlane, however, will tell you that you need a broader view to come up with a great idea.
After all the (healthy) idea behind learning and information aggregation in the first place would be that you learn all that stuff to be better prepared towards taking the right (intelligent and educated) actions.
So there might be an individual balance that you have to find/develop and keep up. The trivial solutions at the edges never seem to satisfy.
That's a good point! I didn't mean to imply that the book says that dedication to learning or producing is enough in and of itself. Just to say that one of the things I agreed with in the book is that it's better to be a producer than a consumer.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, and thought some of the advice in there was really good. One thing I thought was valuable was something I think you're getting at in your post - which is that ideas that have the potential to make big money quickly have a combination of scale and reach and magnitude.
As a younger guy, I thought that the way people got rich was to get a good job and save lots of money (think doctor, lawyer, engineer). But as I entered the workforce I started to understand that actual rich people I encountered almost exclusively got wealthy through owning or being pretty high up in a business.
One thing that reading Millionaire Fastlane helped me crystallize is that serious wealth creation isn't an inherent property of all businesses, and that plenty of self owned businesses don't pay as well as a regular job, and even create more work for their owners than a job would. And that businesses that can create real wealth (read: "can make someone rich") have to have that scale and reach.
Overall I felt the read was worth my time, even if there are some things about it that I didn't love.
Guilty as charged, closed 2022 w/ 6k+ on 2 [onetab]s. Jon Blow said "often if you just keep observing the pattern, it will naturally give you the ability to break out of it" so let's find out. Good case study though.
I'm regularly starting a custom firefox extension to manage them ~700..800 tabs (my average) but then I choke and the cycle repeat :)
Happy to know other have this problem.
ps: to Mozilla Firefox team, kudos on handling that much .. I've used firefox with 1200 open tabs (all kinds of complexity) and it still work ok on my old machine. That said one can notice a clear change in lag after 300-400 but well I won't complain :)
Writing things down to remember them, you feel like you've dealt with it. Which can be a great help since you can empty your brain of distractions that pop up and do so in a way you feel you've not just forgotten something. And reread later you'll realise how little was really important outside the moment it came up.
But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on everything that might be interesting, then that's probably overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development, or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the same things.
I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my notes in some way.
I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I don't have an eidetic memory).
I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy with my progress in the past week.
edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information blackhole for me.
edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to organize my notes.
Thanks for linking Featherwiki. I've used Tiddlywiki, and it's good to see other entries in this space (wikis as a single HTML file).
Featherwiki's 55KB size is quite small compared to Tiddlywiki's 2MB. That said, the size difference alone may not be sufficient reason to switch away from Tiddlywiki.
This article hits close to home, but there is one crucial component missing; free time. For the most part, I'm at my laptop or mobile about half of my primary work day, and take regular breaks from actual work to check out HN or any other gathering of techheads I follow. Here's where the data collection happens, mostly, as another commenter mentioned, projects I was to try or have been inspired by, skills to brush up on, etc.
There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data collection.
Yes, I resonate with this a lot. It’s one thing to have time to capture information but a whole other thing to have the time to extract the essence out of it. I still haven’t figured out an answer yet though.
This is interesting. I don’t do this anymore, but maybe I should.
Usually I just trust that when I need something I’ll be able to find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad that maybe I should not trust that I’ll be able to find it again when I need it. Maybe today it’s more worth while to build a library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago.
Ah this is a big part of my hoarding problem - I find something useful today, tomorrow I need it and it's gone. Of course this happens to 0.01% of things I find... but I don't know which 0.01% it will be.
From time to time (months to years) I go back to those links (usually saved in my rss reader), or at least some of the newest, and try to turn some of those links into knowledge. Some may not work anymore, the remaining I try to put in categories/bookmarks, or give me time to read and then decide what to do with them. Sometimes that read implies more work, like taking notes, learning more about some discussed topics, link them somewhat with other pieces of saved content.
The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat available when I need them, at least for a lot of places/software/etc.
In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how to recover something interesting you found about a particular topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present context. But either on time or volume you must put some restrictions.
I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go into category folders (which makes me think twice about bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly).
Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read this" way and close them if not.
I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to start doing this.
Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's it in there?
> I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks
Wow that’s some dedication. For me bookmarking doesn’t work, still I do it. My bad habit I guess ;-)
I never revisit that stuff, because there is always so much new and more exciting stuff coming in all the time that the old stuff seems almost irrelevant.
Yeah, that was me exactly! I just couldn't face that massive long list anymore - it had been ported from computer to computer for years and was the digital equivalent of clearing out the garage (and it felt great afterwards)! It was amazing how useless half of them now were.
Task for a future-tech AI; feed the AI all the articles/books/bookmarks/ideas you would like to have read or 'should' read, and then see what kind of a person it becomes after ingesting them.
> Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably Google.
I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.
> I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.
They do. The search history shows up in the address bar as you type. But sometimes it’s annoying and maybe a privacy issue especially when you are screen sharing with someone.
>Why do I find myself in this situation? Is it FOMO driving me to want to keep track of everything? Perhaps it’s some form of perfectionism or even an addiction.
My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1].
>Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them? Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows others to do the next steps.
The opposite of information hoarding is not unexciting, mind-numbing work. The opposite of information hoarding is doing what you want to do.
If somebody can do something nice, and still does information hoarding, things become interesting.
That's why it's more than a habit:
>Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances
Information hoarding is the perfect repeatable event. There is an almost infinite supply of rewarding ideas and there is no physical obstacle building up that triggers invention from somebody else.
With those conditions, any traumatic event, any drama, can be projected onto these situations until the lesson is learned.
The cruel paradox of the information hoarder community is that they haven't managed to create a list of information that helps to resolves their unfortunate condition.
to offer an opposing view: libraries are cool. i frequently reference and revisit links i have saved, and on a rainy day a quick browse of them often inspires a new project or advances some existing work. i don't know what i would gain by blowing that all away. naturally links that are infrequently used settle to the bottom of the list and die anyway.
i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in opera years ago. its sort of like having album art.
so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser implementation, yet another speed dial:
I do the same kind of thing, and apparently, many others here do too!
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.
There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.
^^^THIS. I've always felt that my greatest superpower was the gift to search/find information fast. This allows me to both discover a wide range of info and also go hunting for targetted info when the situation dictates a more narrow scope. Pre-fetch provides the quickest time-to-value. With a near infinite cache to fill, it only makes sense to continually feed a steady diet of information to satisfy relentless curiosity. Bookmarking, re-reading/re-visiting past info, writing and sharing info tidbits of random info, etc ... all help to lock-in what I'm aware of and also provide confidence to go hunting and rediscover a known nugget when a particular situation/conversation could benefit.
TL;DR: Awareness comes in two forms: quick immediate recall and fuzzy vague confidence of related material. To expand breadth and depth of both forms, it's beneficial to hunt information efficiently.
Set time aside when you are allowed to do it. In other times block the offending sites completely.
Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your favourite would? If now, stop and move on.
Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution.
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[ 23.2 ms ] story [ 4508 ms ] threadThe biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself, is not information, it's "data."
There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
Information is what you derive from the data. It's your summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you make between a thing and some other thing you previously recorded.
Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily create those connections, and that's very much based on the zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now allows, which is more complex and nuanced.
Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.
https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
https://logseq.com/
https://obsidian.md/
He's just saying that he has too many links to go through and your answer is "what if you wrote a massive note about each of those links?"...
There is no point in hoarding links; this is just "information." Information by itself is not useful; we need "data" instead.
To turn this information into data, you could use something like Zettelkasten. Instead of hoarding links to articles, hoard notes about these articles and link them together.
Basically, stop hoarding links due to your FOMO. Actually read articles that interest you and learn from them by writing your thoughts.
Although the definitions are some what murky, this is the generally accepted model.
I think what you are talking about is personal knowledge management.
The author writes his problem very clearly: he doesn't have time to go through the links.
Suggesting that he not only goes through the links but also writes a Zettelkasten note about it is simply ridiculous.
I'm not saying that the original comment is wrong, just that it's completely off topic and presents something as a solution when it's actually just a bigger problem.
I think sometimes we can overweight the impact of tools and systems for retaining knowledge. These tools can be useful (I'm working on my own home grown versions of them) and I am getting better with the systems as I get more practice. But, still, this is a race you can never win. As you digest more information, you consume more.
Eventually you've got to get out there and be a maker.
A) Allowing yourself to be distracted by useless information
B) Under-organizing (or over-organizing) the information you collect
The OP may over-collect pieces of information that aren't important (URLs of random things that are novel) and may not spend enough time adding context to what he collects (e.g. via notes in a tool like Obsidian).
I find the ideas behind zettelkasten very useful. Our brains are not able to remember everything of value, therefore it is worthwhile to invest a little energy in an external or "second brain" where information is stored with some degree of organization for future retrieval.
I have a cache of notes on all manner of subjects going back about a decade. I only recently discovered Obsidian and have been gradually linking those notes together, adding context etc. This has had a real impact on my understanding of certain topics because I've re-discovered insights and knowledge of many things I had simply forgotten.
This is key.
If you didn't choose the right words, it could be lost forever.
I gave lots of tools a go. Really really tried. Logseq was one of them. Eventually, it had too many features I didn't need, and needed me to be too careful about how I input text.
I've settled on using about 200 plain text notes based on different subjects. And I use my bookmarks as a knowledge graph.
What I am waiting for is a killer-app bookmark manager with very powerful search, and tagging. Maybe some way to import into a tool like Logseq. FLOSS of course.
- Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just trawl through my starred repos.
- Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere (and if it does, problem solved!)
- Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with links to other key information I already have in there, or as the root of a new bundle of nodes.
The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone. The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly.
Bookmarks wouldn't offer anything extra, and create extra hassle when you change device/browser.
Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly while I've been reading and not doing (this is part of the procrastination on starting many of those projects).
I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone share.
That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the "damn, where have i read that again?"
It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor docs anyway =)
Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2 days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it anymore.
But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO, but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast partially solved for now.
Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more information out there as said by one of the comments.
I wouldn’t mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from my curated list of articles I’ve archived in this manner!
When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-friendliness, not more.
Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The interests of the media in representing information do not match my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.
Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.
So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.
That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).
I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,
https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?
I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.
Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for 35k.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102
Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running costs in 2017.
There are some detailed blog posts from the time about running costs somewhere.
This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.
I have yet to find a solution for this.
One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.
Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".
It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".
--
[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title.
https://memex.garden/
The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.
OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.
https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...
WARNING: archiving can be habit forming.
Now the issue to me is how to convince folks it is worthwhile
I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be safely forgotten.
So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a month, you'll see them and it might make a difference in your habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.
I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in itself to fix.
Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.
does research get you to have so many open? How do you manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.
Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.
I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.
I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.
My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:
WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.
I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.
feel free to try it out:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.
Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.
Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!
I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs, the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall it. And then I keep hoarding.
I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated.
...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in.
Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized. Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces" are the killer feature for me.
https://tabula.civitat.es/images/2023/01/06/8krQ.png
I may have a problem.
Repeat next morning.
...the restoring part doesn't happen.
Also they were tabs at one point.
Except I can hit restore all...
What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full well I'll never, ever look for most of them again...
It's an comfort blanket.
I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
How do you achieve that?
• A single floating window acting as an opener*
• windows are always arranged in the case of tiling wms.
• In the case of Firefox user.css can help u remove the tab bar entirely. And opening in windows rather than tabs can be configured.
• I built my own window fuzzy searcher for finding windows.
The effect is compulsory need to close windows asap but keep a couple of windows forever that are actually for doing work. In my case :
• newsboat > firefox. • Cmus > firefox. • Aerc > firefox. • Irssi > firefox.
The list goes on and on.
The benefit is this: every job has it’s own window.
Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in “production/building” mode the default is consuming. This setup merely helps heighten awareness to the fact.
Hope it helps!
* lf, ranger, nnn are all good choices.
(the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha)
I feel this deeply
The compromise I found was just to dump them into my bookmarking service. If I really really need to find that thing again, it's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab.
I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll also never read.
To me they're just different organisational methods that work well in different contexts.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... is absolutely crucial.
I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so that you could browse history of those separately. It could also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for example.
Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can tell, cannot be even browsed by date.
I can not read them from there too and they won't take up resources from my computer =)
This really spoke to me - I find it to be a really positive way of framing the frustration I often feel with myself when I just can't get focused on work. Because at the end of the day, the clicking through links or reading up on something tangential to the result I want is driven by the same things that make me want to be creative in the first place.
I recently read The Millionaire Fastlane - which is a book I have seriously mixed feelings about - but one of the things that I thought was good in it was the advice to focus on being a producer rather than a consumer. I like this framing of the dichotomy, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Being productive is important, though. The Billionaire Fastlane, however, will tell you that you need a broader view to come up with a great idea.
After all the (healthy) idea behind learning and information aggregation in the first place would be that you learn all that stuff to be better prepared towards taking the right (intelligent and educated) actions.
So there might be an individual balance that you have to find/develop and keep up. The trivial solutions at the edges never seem to satisfy.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, and thought some of the advice in there was really good. One thing I thought was valuable was something I think you're getting at in your post - which is that ideas that have the potential to make big money quickly have a combination of scale and reach and magnitude.
As a younger guy, I thought that the way people got rich was to get a good job and save lots of money (think doctor, lawyer, engineer). But as I entered the workforce I started to understand that actual rich people I encountered almost exclusively got wealthy through owning or being pretty high up in a business.
One thing that reading Millionaire Fastlane helped me crystallize is that serious wealth creation isn't an inherent property of all businesses, and that plenty of self owned businesses don't pay as well as a regular job, and even create more work for their owners than a job would. And that businesses that can create real wealth (read: "can make someone rich") have to have that scale and reach.
Overall I felt the read was worth my time, even if there are some things about it that I didn't love.
Happy to know other have this problem.
ps: to Mozilla Firefox team, kudos on handling that much .. I've used firefox with 1200 open tabs (all kinds of complexity) and it still work ok on my old machine. That said one can notice a clear change in lag after 300-400 but well I won't complain :)
But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on everything that might be interesting, then that's probably overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development, or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the same things.
I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my notes in some way.
I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I don't have an eidetic memory).
I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy with my progress in the past week.
edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information blackhole for me.
edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to organize my notes.
For actual notes, or detailed lists, I like Featherwiki.
https://feather.wiki/
Featherwiki's 55KB size is quite small compared to Tiddlywiki's 2MB. That said, the size difference alone may not be sufficient reason to switch away from Tiddlywiki.
There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data collection.
Usually I just trust that when I need something I’ll be able to find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad that maybe I should not trust that I’ll be able to find it again when I need it. Maybe today it’s more worth while to build a library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago.
The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat available when I need them, at least for a lot of places/software/etc.
In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how to recover something interesting you found about a particular topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present context. But either on time or volume you must put some restrictions.
I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go into category folders (which makes me think twice about bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly).
Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read this" way and close them if not.
I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to start doing this.
Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's it in there?
Wow that’s some dedication. For me bookmarking doesn’t work, still I do it. My bad habit I guess ;-) I never revisit that stuff, because there is always so much new and more exciting stuff coming in all the time that the old stuff seems almost irrelevant.
The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably Google.
I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.
They do. The search history shows up in the address bar as you type. But sometimes it’s annoying and maybe a privacy issue especially when you are screen sharing with someone.
My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1].
>Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them? Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows others to do the next steps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion
I think it's some kind of uneasiness with actual work. Actual work is hard, not exciting and the reward may come in a distant future.
Maybe I should avoid HN much more because it gives me a dopamine kick without having accomplished anything.
If somebody can do something nice, and still does information hoarding, things become interesting.
That's why it's more than a habit:
>Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances
Information hoarding is the perfect repeatable event. There is an almost infinite supply of rewarding ideas and there is no physical obstacle building up that triggers invention from somebody else.
With those conditions, any traumatic event, any drama, can be projected onto these situations until the lesson is learned.
The cruel paradox of the information hoarder community is that they haven't managed to create a list of information that helps to resolves their unfortunate condition.
i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in opera years ago. its sort of like having album art.
so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser implementation, yet another speed dial:
https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.
There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.
Presumably this also helped Microsoft pivot into reaping machines.
TL;DR: Awareness comes in two forms: quick immediate recall and fuzzy vague confidence of related material. To expand breadth and depth of both forms, it's beneficial to hunt information efficiently.
Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your favourite would? If now, stop and move on.
Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution.