[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/t...
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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)?
Author : miguelrochefort
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-05-22 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I declared Instapaper bankruptcy last month when I moved to
| Pocket. I used to add about 10 links a day to Instapaper thinking
| that one day I would come around to reading them all. Lol, never
| going to happen.
|
| I moved to Pocket because my Kobo Elipsa has integration with it.
| But because of this, my filter to adding to Pocket is now "Will I
| read this link on my Elipsa". If not, why add to it in the first
| place.
|
| So after a month, I've only got about 10 articles in my Pocket
| account, all having been read on my Elipsa.
| ftyhbhyjnjk wrote:
| On an unrelated note, try raindrop.io. I "was" a pocket
| customer for 4+ years until I discovered raindrop.io. Now I
| don't want to go back to pocket again. Do give raindrop.io a
| try. Fyi, it does NOT have "For You" recommendations.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| I probably have over 10,000 items in Pocket. I say probably
| because I never actually open the app.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fortunately for you, you'll discover soon enough that Pocket is
| utterly useless for accessing/reading the contents you've
| saved. It's Mozilla's Giant Cloud Recycle Bin.
| saurik wrote:
| I think the fundamental cause of the problem is actually the
| existence of other people: they tell new stories, perform new
| studies, and provide new opportunities, all of which result in a
| seemingly un-ending flood of tasks. My recommendation--if this is
| really bothering you--is thereby to limit your exposure to other
| people by whatever means necessary and then begin spending any
| resources you can spare on a campaign to prevent the spread of
| new people.
| tome wrote:
| Move everything that you've been putting off dealing with for
| more than a year to a "some day/maybe" folder. You are welcome to
| inspect that folder at your leisure, and tackle items on it.
| Though since I created that folder 15 years ago, I never have.
| nvartolomei wrote:
| Answered a somewhat similar questions before, hope you find it
| useful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641406.
| jrockway wrote:
| What I learned from the COIVD vaccine is that seeing something
| twice separated by frequency is a pretty good model for other
| things. So instead of bookmarking something the first time I see
| it, I make a mental note, and then the next time I see it, I go
| add a bookmark or learn more about that. For example, rqlite has
| been on my radar for a while. I heard about it, thought "that's
| neat" and promptly forgot its name. Then I saw it again, and
| decided "ok, I'll install it and see what it's like to interact
| with". Now I know it well, but if it never came up again, then I
| wouldn't bother knowing about it.
|
| This technique doesn't work for everyone, of course, but it's how
| I stay sane.
|
| For work-related interrupts; inbox, Slack, code reviews... I just
| do those immediately. If someone is blocked on me, I'm just
| throwing away money if I make them ask again a day later (since
| they are probably off to YouTube to chill out or something until
| I do the thing they asked). I find it very easy to jump back into
| something, even if I was in the legendary "flow state" at the
| time. (This is a skill you teach yourself, not an intrinsic
| aspect of your personality, I think.)
|
| Finally, it's worth noting that you don't have to reply to your
| emails if you dont' want to. Just because someone wants something
| from you (your time) doesn't mean you have to give it to them.
| Too much of this, though, and people will stop talking to you.
| Maybe that's what you want, maybe that's not what you want. As
| with everything, there is a feedback loop and you are in control
| of whether it increases or decreases the volume of requests. (I
| suppose you can do this at work too. "If you don't want to be
| asked to do something, don't do a good job," they say. But,
| again, too much of that and you just get fired ;)
| koliber wrote:
| For the TODO list, I can share one frame of mind that I use.
|
| I have a "now", "soon", and "later" section in my TODO list.
|
| "Now" grows and shrinks, but never gets out of control. Things
| sometimes move from "now" to "soon" or "later." I am constantly
| working off of this list.
|
| The "soon" section varies. Often, things get pulled into "now",
| when they become time sensitive. Some things stick around long
| enough and it becomes clear they don't need to get done soon,
| despite of what I thought. These move to the "later" list.
|
| The "later" list is interesting. Most of the time time, I don't
| touch these things. But occasionally, I look through it, and
| realize I am in the mood to do one of them, and then I work on
| it. Or the circumstances align and the situation is just perfect
| to get one of those items done. Occasionally, I go through it,
| and find things on there that are no longer relevant, and I
| remove them. For other things, I put them into various "fanciful
| idea" lists which are noncommittal, don't weigh me down, and
| could serve as inspiration if a need arises.
| Void_ wrote:
| I'm building an app for exactly this approach - FocusTask.app
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| I have two piles: "Time to do something about", and "Time has
| done something about". Amazing how many things kind of fade out
| in time.
| civilized wrote:
| And just for "fun" (YMMV on that!), these correspond with the
| basic columns on a Kanban board:
|
| - Now = in progress
|
| - Soon = selected for development
|
| - Later = backlog
|
| Occasionally I've found it useful to bring work concepts like
| this into my personal life.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I use Now, Soon, and Later lists too (in separate text files),
| but time box them to Today, This Week, and Later. Every Sunday,
| I review my Later list and pull items into my This Week list.
| Every evening, I review my This Week list and prepare
| tomorrow's Today list.
|
| With this system, I can focus on Today's relevant items,
| knowing they are the right ones and not have to stress about
| future work because I know it's captured in my Later list and I
| won't lose it because I review the Later list every Sunday.
| Ideally my Today list should be empty at the end of every day
| and my This Week list empty at the end of every week, but
| unfortunately that rarely happens.
| aquajet wrote:
| I've just started to index everything and then search it as I
| need it rather than spend time organizing. File storage is pretty
| cheap so it was the least expensive of all the options
|
| I also made a chrome extension that would show similar saved
| items to whatever is currently open in my tab, which also ended
| up working well when I forgot what I had indexed.
|
| It worked surprisingly well for me personal use, so now am trying
| to sell it as a product https://www.diva.so
|
| Disclaimer: am a cofounder for Diva.
| ebbflowgo wrote:
| I use usehappen.com to archive saves/bookmarks and upcoming
| events. It's saved me an enormous amount of stress.
| mfashby wrote:
| Sounds like a job for Marie Kondo, organising consultant.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo
| butz wrote:
| Introduce artificial limits, e.g. 10 emails in inbox, 10 online
| accounts, 100 saved items, etc. And if you want to add new item,
| you'll have to cleanup some old ones to make space, either by
| archiving them to some sort of "deep storage", or just deleting.
| Very likely, that such limits might help you to find even better
| ways to organize everything, instead of constantly fighting them.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Personal finance analogy is probably incorrect. My guess is a
| better analogy is notebook/journal/scrapbook.
|
| Think of all of these items as short/medium term working memory.
| Rather than looking at the items as intrinsically valuable, think
| about the outcome as intrinsically valuable and the items as
| vehicles to get some job done.
|
| Perhaps you have some goal, such as learning to play piano,
| getting promoted to lead engineer, starting your own company. If
| that's the case, if there's important material you discover, take
| as many notes as you need (which could be nothing) as you work
| through the as much of the material as you need (which could be
| very little) and go from there.
|
| In and of itself, storing likes, bookmarks, papers, movies,
| photos, files, etc is just hoarding. And in fact, it's a form of
| procrastination that feels like a great substitute for doing the
| actual thing you are trying to get done.
|
| Let go of all that "helpful" content and you are thrust in front
| of the giant, scary, empty space of what is between you and your
| goal. Sit with that space, let it wash over you, and you won't
| need any of the other junk anymore.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| If you're up for a left-field idea... give yourself a 6 month
| free pass to keep doing exactly what you're doing (so in your
| case that sounds like buying that extra storage!) but start
| collecting data on what you consume.
|
| Don't do anything manually, you'll probably find it hard to track
| everything that way - but a script to parse your browse history
| (usually a sqlite file in your profile - and depending on browser
| you may be able to see sync'd history from other devices), your
| watch history in your video storage/streaming services, your #
| views of photos etc etc
|
| See if you can enrich your metrics collection with the inevitable
| global variables of life (time of day you consumed something,
| what was the weather like, was that a work day, check the hours
| of sleep & exercise you had from your phone or wherever...)
|
| Best case: you get to know yourself a little better.
|
| I've done this twice now, first time was a complete waste of
| time. I learned nothing of value. Second time lead to me ditching
| a ton of podcasts, renewing my audible subscription but changing
| the types of books i get, it was also the turning point for
| coming off facebook for me, there were a bunch of really high
| value outcomes that second time.
| iamben wrote:
| Stop worrying about inbox zero. Stop trying to read everything.
| Admit to yourself you neither care about reading every tab you
| have open, or will get round to dealing with them -- periodically
| go through them and close them. Stop making the to-do a bucket
| list and just do what you can do.
|
| Chill out.
|
| This is absolutely my own experience, my own opinion. I've been
| you, I've burned out. Life is short, there is so much to enjoy -
| pick the bits you want and enjoy them, you will absolutely not
| get to everything.
| navjack27 wrote:
| I 2nd this so hard
| user_7832 wrote:
| Just a singular data point from my side, but is there a chance
| you may have AD(H)D or O(C)D? I likely have ADHD myself (official
| dx pending), and I also have a very similar "I'm interested in
| everything!" feeling. My inbox has ~4k mails, and I likely have
| 2k tabs open across different devices/browsers/OSes.
|
| If this is the case, I'd recommend taking a long, hard look at
| the things you want, and what _you 'll regret if you don't do_. I
| love the idea of an FPGA but I won't regret not knowing how to
| code for one. Though ironically I can hardly say much to you in
| my current situation without coming off as hypocritical.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Two specific resources for you.
|
| First, the Eisenhower matrix of important/urgent:
|
| https://www.techtello.com/eisenhower-productivity-matrix/
|
| Use this framework to filter your content. I bet most of it fits
| in quadrants 3/4.
|
| Second, check this time management talk
|
| It's not what you read, it's what you ignore
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWPgUn8tL8s
|
| Tons of useful information there. One key takeaway is: do less
| stuff, but of higher quality.
| moneywoes wrote:
| I have this issue and I think the only fix is to stop reading /
| consuming
| contingencies wrote:
| _Furious activity is no substitute for understanding._
|
| You can also delegate, eg. stop reading and use some keyword-
| based alerts so your feed quality increases.
| zarriak wrote:
| The first two things I would do is figure out why you have so
| many feeds and try to stop some of the consumption at the source
| and also organize the content you do have.
|
| My first tip is to separate content consumption away from your
| work/daily driver phone. The way I do this is on my phone my open
| tabs are only new things I want to cook soon and HN. It lets me
| get just a little bit of content without algorithms addicting me.
|
| Secondly I try to categorize my wishlist as milestones or
| personal goals. My rationale is if I'm able to achieve x then I
| can deal with distraction y in my life. It also lets me separate
| between things I want soon and eventually. I realize sometimes
| those things are just neat and I don't want them a month or 6
| after I first saw it. This periodically reduces my bookmarks
| while also being a good barometer of where I'm at in life now.
| tobylane wrote:
| I cull a topic that I never went further than collecting for. I
| export my bookmarks to dropbox, dated and labelled, then clean up
| the browser bookmarks. Same for notes, I have an unwanted
| ideas.txt, including reasons why they ended up unwanted.
| codeptualize wrote:
| I would focus on the things that cause problems (if there are
| any), and solve those. Just ignore everything else.
|
| The only problem you mention is storage, and as you mention it's
| pretty easy to solve by just buying more. You could also
| refinance and move the big (not-so-important) files onto cheap
| hard drives or other "cold storage" to free up space on your
| devices.
|
| As to "read it later" lists and such; I would give up. It sounds
| a bit perfectionistic to want to consume it all and miss/loose
| nothing. Don't ask the impossible of yourself to go through all
| of it, at least half of it is outdated or not relevant anymore,
| I'm sure there are better ways to spend your time. Interesting
| and important things will resurface.
|
| Generally my attitude is: If it doesn't impact me negatively, I
| don't care. I see it as organized chaos; minimizing time spend on
| organizing while maximizing utility. Storage is cheap and search
| is pretty powerful these days.
|
| Those tools are there for you, not the other way around. Use the
| ones that help you or bring you joy, ignore (or delete) the rest.
| pkrotich wrote:
| This is digital version of hoarding!
|
| I struggle with it too - I think a better tagging system would
| solve it for me but I've accepted I'll never read all the books
| in my wishlist or even some I bought years ago and yet to read
| them.
| [deleted]
| melony wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with having many items. Tech is designed
| to scale. If your productivity apps can't keep up with your
| behavior, then it's time for an upgrade.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| I would tend to agree, but two things still bother me:
|
| 1. My saved items live in 100+ different silos. If they all
| lived in one place, say some kind of self-hosted personal data
| store, I probably would be less concerned. I've started to
| consolidate as much as I could into a handful of ecosystems
| (e.g., Pocket -> Keep, Dropbox -> Drive, Airtable -> Sheets,
| Todoist -> Tasks, RSS -> Gmail digest, Zoom -> Meet) and it
| seems to help a bit.
|
| 2. There is no easy way to organize, sort, prioritize,
| schedule, or even search for these items. Related items should
| be clustered together. Large items should be summarized and/or
| broken down. Urgent items should reach my inbox, be prioritized
| and scheduled. Popular and highly-rated items should rise to
| the top. Saved items should appear at the top of my Google
| search results. Without that, they might as well not exist.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Then find a single unified storage option (I'd look at either
| your own solution using flatfiles or a database such as
| sqlite, or something along the lines of NextCloud), _have
| redudant copies of that), and as you migrate data to it,_
| close the origin accounts*.
|
| 1,000 individual services is at least 900 too many. Probably
| 990 too many.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| Absolutely declare bankruptcy. You'll realize it's different from
| dying and come through a better, more self-aware person.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| Reduce your spending, to near zero, and switch to almost always
| just-in-time.
|
| In my experience, todos and bookmarks grow because I assume that
| my future me will be more interested than my present me about
| some thing, and so I send it to him. The truth is that anything I
| don't have an actual drive in reading or doing _right now_, I
| won't have an actual drive either in the future.
|
| If you don't need to fight the irrepressible urge to read or do
| something, let it go. Otherwise, read it or do it right now.
| Todos are there in the case you don't have the time right now.
| dmje wrote:
| This is as much a comment to myself as to you or anyone else
| (I've got some similar hoarding tendencies): it really doesn't
| matter.
|
| I had a realisation the other day - it happened after I
| accidentally perma-deleted my Wallabag install. I was sad for
| about 5 minutes that those hundreds of "read later" articles
| weren't ever going to get read later - and then this was followed
| by the most immense relief.
|
| I'm going to try and apply this sense of cathartic relief to the
| rest of my over-bloated, never-looked-at, just-no-time storage.
| I've got a feeling the act of deleting it all is going to hurt
| like hell for a short while and then it'll feel like a huge
| weight lifted.
|
| I'm never going to be short of things to read or watch, and life
| is way too short.
| 6510 wrote:
| Reincarnation!
|
| Ok, on a serious note: Start a new bookmark thing, take some time
| to briefly gaze over what you have and duplicate the good stuff
| in the new thing.
|
| In hindsight it's pretty easy to see what your folder names
| should have been.
|
| Before I would just save the bookmarks as some kind of html
| document and name the folder after the year. It's not that useful
| for things you want to use frequently which is... well.. what you
| use most frequently.
| navjack27 wrote:
| Inbox zero is a useless metric. You can do the same thing with
| Inbox 9999+ by just self filtering. Only looking at what you need
| to look at. Ignoring the fact that you have unread. Just reading
| the body snippet.
|
| Who cares? We all have thousands of accounts at this point
| especially if you've been using the internet since the 90s. Learn
| to just be okay with stuff. Literally not everything that you
| have is a red badge that needs to be addressed immediately.
|
| I mean if you want to go off of raw files I have multiple tens of
| millions of files on my computers. Did I make them all? No. I
| mean most of them are just files that just happened to be there
| because computers have files.
|
| Cool you got likes awesome.
|
| Cool you got bookmarks awesome.
|
| I don't know my overarching advice to you because it seems like
| you're paying attention to everything at the same time with equal
| weighting on everything is that you just stop doing that.
| troupe wrote:
| When it comes to emails and files, sort by size. You can delete
| 10k tiny files and make less of an impact than deleting one or
| two large files.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Todo list growing is okay. Only top 5 are relevant. Just have
| daily item to drop all that are outside top 10. Move timed events
| to calendar. Okay for bookmarks to grow infinitely - no
| obligation to complete.
|
| Stop with FOMO mentality. That is prime problem. Trying to never
| miss out. Life is short and more things to do than not do.
| Maximize list of things to not do. Remove optionality. Just lying
| to yourself since not going to do it.
|
| But key action items:
|
| - Only top 10 on todo
|
| - Snooze for inbox to moment of action
|
| - Tasks to Calendar for moment of action
|
| - Drop all else.
|
| Life unchanged on outcome; better on morale; trust me
| michaelleland wrote:
| Get away from all these things just long enough to write down an
| overarching goal for your life. Include your loved ones in this
| goal-setting. Discard, delete, unsubscribe, close, destroy all of
| those things that obscure your path towards that goal.
| cr555 wrote:
| this was great. i now have 5 more tabs open. thx
| [deleted]
| csydas wrote:
| my work inbox is by nature of my job is some sort of email hydra;
| if I take out one thread, 10 more appear. This is kind of a
| blessing/curse of always-on communication and instant connections
| in that you can drown yourself in them, and in fact, some like it
| that way. Edit: Forgot to write how I handle this -- for actual
| emails I need to check, just careful filters (with a backup of
| the filters) helps me and I can more rapidly figure out which
| folders need attention when they have badges, which can sit, and
| which is the "quick check" (general inbox). The benefit for me is
| I can shift context a lot better -- items in my Team's DL folder
| I pay high attention to, general reports I relegate to "when I
| have time/need", Boss emails get high attention always (one of my
| few "must be 0" folders), and the rest are just held until the
| next coffee break and and browsed over a coffee.
|
| Comparing it to finance I think is actually a risky thing as you
| have an obligation with finances (debt), but you don't
| necessarily have an obligation to all the items in your inbox.
| First step is allow yourself to acknowledge this. The world won't
| end if you don't answer some items or if you don't happen to
| watch a unique one-of-a-kind youtube video.
|
| I used to digitally horde when I was in University because
| bandwidth was a commodity and I never knew if I'd ever have a
| chance to see certain movies or play certain games again. I kept
| multiple 50 disk spindles of Wii and GCN games I knew I would
| never play because I was just so into the process of using my
| modded Wii that the process was the attraction, not the actual
| games themselves.
|
| Eventually, I just fell into minimalism naturally. Moving cross
| country and emigrating helped a bit here as it changed my
| priorities from "hoard as much as possible" to "why the hell did
| I buy a novelty bottle opener in the first place?" as my needs
| changed.
|
| With reading, realize that a lot of it is garbage and learn to
| filter good sources from bad ones. This is regrettably easier
| said than done, but it's an old university habit I learned
| because necessity (read: laziness) meant I needed to find
| premiere papers fast and sort good sources rich with information
| from bad ones.
|
| For articles in particular, I ended up just taking a long look at
| the articles I came back to and found the style that resonated
| with me the most and that I felt had the biggest impact on the
| way I think. Challenging articles with good logical thought
| processes that advanced my thinking or articles on subjects I was
| not familiar with but knew enough to start on really got my
| interest and typically are my clicks on sites like HN. I avoid
| too many content aggregators, especially ones with heavy focus on
| karma/upvotes/whatever as the metric is perverse towards
| interesting content in my opinion and more just interested in
| adding content to get the reward. I use other content aggregators
| like Instagram, but very sparingly as I just don't feel the need
| to keep on top of tons of trends; if it hits one of the few sites
| I check regularly, it means it's a premiere meme or topic and
| usually I can spend a few minutes researching on my own to figure
| out what's up.
|
| I shifted to become a creator of my own; my own code, stories,
| writing just for me, videos, etc, and it changed the way I viewed
| content available. Once I started making my own things with my
| mind and hands, suddenly I didn't feel so compelled to watch
| others do the same. It's one part arrogance I guess and one part
| freedom. (e.g., I used to really be into FoodNetwork even to the
| point of getting into reality shows. I told myself it was to
| learn to cook, but I never ever did it. Then I just started doing
| it, first for myself so that my mistakes were private, and once I
| thought "eyyyy this was an alright meal", I started to share it
| with friends and family, and sure enough, even my mistakes were
| happily eaten. Ugly but tasty)
|
| If you're going to use one of your options, I'd say go with
| bankruptcy. Just like how a spring cleaning is therapeutic once
| you work up the will for it, so is cleaning out your digital
| footprint. I've been working from MacBook Airs since 2012 (2 of
| them in fact! 2012 and 2019, and the 2012 is still kicking with a
| friend who needed a new laptop), so I got very used to a small
| digital foot print fast. I kept only the pictures I really
| treasured and felt an immediate emotional response to each time I
| check them, and realized that the rest were like any other fad,
| and my attraction passed.
|
| Clean out what you have and do the great purge. The first one
| hurts and you might have a few false starts while you wait for
| the right moment with the motivation to clean, but once you hit
| that moment, you ought feel a lot of stress and weight lifted off
| of you.
| helph67 wrote:
| I use email aliases so different sourced emails drop into
| separate inboxes, makes life easier.
| codevark wrote:
| samgranieri wrote:
| You're gonna need to set aside some dedicated time for this.
| Putting this off will only make this work.
|
| First, unsubscribe from marketing emails, or use filters and
| folders in Gmail (if that's your email) to remove stuff from
| cluttering up your email inbox.
|
| Second, dedicate some time each morning to either act on your
| email or snooze on it until a particular time. I use fantastical
| and also things and create todos from them.
|
| For stuff that's shunted out of your inbox, review those
| periodically by subject. Do a deeper dive if something catches
| your eye.
|
| You'll get back to inbox zero.
|
| Also, dedicate some time to curating your todo list. Don't
| overschedule yourself, you'll find a happy medium. Act on stuff
| instead of letting it pile up. It'll make you feel good.
|
| Next up, go through your password manager and figure out what
| accounts you really need, and either cancel the account or stick
| with it.
|
| Also, look at your bank statement and see what you get auto-
| billed for. Cancel it if you don't need it.
|
| I also have a program on my Mac, hazel, that I use for tending to
| my desktop and download folders. If something is more than a day
| old, move it to a dedicated folder by file type.
|
| Also, dedicate time to tending to your bookmarks and other
| digital assets.
| slightwinder wrote:
| What is the point of collecting, if you don't consume them? Do
| you even consume? How many of them are still relevant? How many
| of those items have any relevant worth? Does this harm your live?
| Or is this separate from important items?
|
| You should figure out which are important, and get rid of the
| irrelevant. And better start with the biggest storage-waste to
| free your space. And if you can't decide, remove it all. This
| reads as if you are in a zone of problems and locked in a
| decision-problem?
| polio wrote:
| Bankruptcy makes sense if you're paying interest. Just schedule
| some time to go through the backlog.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 1. Accept that you are a hoarder. 2. Stop hoarding. For example,
| stop bookmarking. Just accept that either you read somethig or
| you let it slip into the void of everything you'll never read.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Came here to say this sounds like hoarding behavior. To OP: do
| you also have problems accumulating physical things, organizing
| them, being unable to discard anything?
|
| For your online stuff, I'd do a mass delete of anything over 90
| days old (or pick some other cutoff). You just have accept
| what's already obvious: you're never going to go through all of
| it, so why keep it?
| dnndev wrote:
| If you haven't used it in 6 months get rid of it. Use this
| principal for everything in life.
|
| Of course with the exception for certain documents such as birth
| certificates, tax records (until mandated), etc..
| LordHeini wrote:
| Maybe i am weirdly unorganized, but i think TODO lists of any
| sort, are useless and a complete waste of time.
|
| What do people even put on these?
|
| A list containing miscelanous stuff like "read book x" or" visit
| place y" serves no purpose other than having an ever growing list
| of stuff you will never do.
|
| Pocket is the first thing i throw out on an fresh Firefox
| install. Had no idea what purpose it serves until recently and
| though it to be bloatware added by Mozzilla to make a quick buck.
|
| Never understodd the idea of something like that.
|
| Why would i want dump of unread tabs and random crap i stumble
| upon to be splerched over all my devices? Makes no sense since
| the work tabs differ from the private one and the stuff on the
| phone.
|
| If it is a random article i just read it or open it in a tab.
|
| Every couple of days (or if the tabs annoy me) i just closeall my
| browser tabs and thats it.
|
| If its work related i close the tabs belonging to that task if
| the task is done.
|
| Bookmarks are used for pages i visit often (not random crap!) to
| help the autocompletion to do its job properly on freshly synced
| devices.
|
| Why would i want to store a news article anywhere? Its outdated
| tomorrow. If that random article, blogpost or recipe for fried
| carrot soup is not ready by me today i will never read it. So why
| would i keep it?
|
| Here is what i use:
|
| I have a really dumb shopping list app for groceries on my phone.
| Milk emtpy? -> untic milk so i do not forget it next time i am
| shopping. A genereal TODO list is just overhead here.
|
| A calendar including birthdays, some reminders for important (!)
| events (important like: the plane starts at 07).
|
| For work there is some management tool for the tasks that need to
| be done (provided by the company for company stuff).
|
| Contacts synced via DAV (Phone numbers and the like) i do not use
| Facebook, Google or anything like that (nobody should really).
|
| People i have not met for a year or two get deleted. The random
| party guy gets deleted quickly if i do not think i will meet him
| again in the near future.
|
| Bookmarks and Passwords are synced via Firefox (not the tabs!).
|
| I have a collection of a few GB of music, all of which i like and
| have heard multiple times.
|
| A bunch of photos, i put the the Photos i like to long term
| storage (an external hard drive).
|
| The rest get auto deleted when the smartphone dies or needs a
| reset or i fidget with the bootloader and wipe everything.
|
| No automatic sync via Google, Dropox or whatever (these a just
| giant garbage dumps).
|
| As for emails:
|
| I try to keep my inbox empty, not by reading, but by preventing
| inflow.
|
| That means not giving mail address away willy-nilly.
|
| That means i unsubsribe from those spam thingies every webshop
| has (i don't care that the Plumbus is 20% off today), i
| unsubsrcibe from every mailinglist, RSSand what not the moment i
| deliveres the slightest annoyance by wasting my time. That is,
| manually deleting crap i did not want to read.
|
| My unread inbox is generally empty all the time because i just do
| not accept time wasting garbage there. And the garbage threshold
| is very very low.
|
| That is really awesome, because i never miss the impotant
| messages.
|
| Not sure what to do if you are a compulsive hoarder of data
| garbage.
|
| Maybe some sort of deprecation would help. Hoarding animals have
| the advantage that the stuff they hoard becomes compost after
| some time.
|
| If this where to be true for data, that would be quite nice
| because there would be an upper limit of items (dependent on the
| rate of influx)
|
| But ultimately there is too much media to consume, too many
| places to visit and too much stuff to do in a lifetime.
|
| Not sure why people do that i am too lazy to bother with lists.
|
| I can understand people collecting things for a hobby. Like
| movies or stamps.
|
| But never try to collect everything, collect the things you like.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Reduce your spending
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is a limited amount of work in progress you can handle. The
| most basic process in management is to limit how much you commit
| to:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
| csallen wrote:
| Some categories of work are like respawning hydra heads: the more
| tasks you do, the more tasks reappear in their place. Other
| categories of work are preventative: the more work you do, the
| less respawning hydra work you get. The goal is to do more
| preventative work.
|
| To visualize this, use the Eisenhower Matrix: a 2x2 grid. The top
| row is important tasks, the bottom row is unimportant tasks, the
| left column is urgent tasks, and the right column is non-urgent
| tasks.
|
| Items in the top-left "important and urgent" box are usually
| problems. These are emergencies, and they're typically respawning
| hydra heads. It's tempting to spend lots of your time here, but
| if you do that, you'll turn into someone who's always putting out
| fires. It's necessary to do some of this stuff here, but where
| possible, you want to minimize your time here.
|
| Items in the bottom-left "not important but urgent" box are
| usually _other_ people 's problems and emergencies: people
| sending you emails, text messages, calls, requests, favor
| requests, etc. The more you respond to this stuff, the more
| people will send to you. This became particularly vivid to me one
| week when I was exceptionally on top of my email inbox, and by
| the time I'd finish an inbox zero session, half the emails had
| already come back as replies.
|
| Items in the bottom-right "not important and not urgent" box are
| time wasting activities you don't really want to do.
|
| The top-right "important but not urgent" box is really where you
| want to spend your time. These are preventative, foundational,
| strategic, and restorative tasks that help you live your life
| according to your values, act at your best, and get things under
| control. It's not just work stuff, either. It's taking care of
| your relationships and recreation and health, too. The more time
| you spend here, the less you'll see urgent work piling up from
| yourself and from others.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Very interesting. Seems we are similar :D
|
| What I didn't understand: How is the growing list of things
| stressing you out? Do you feel pressured to do something with the
| items?
| metadat wrote:
| It's pointless accumulation and hoarding, and eventually
| becomes disorganized, which can be some degree of.stressful to
| deal with.
| Mezzie wrote:
| This is it for me.
|
| I'm a librarian, so I'm AWARE each time I look at my dumping
| grounds that I should organize them. Of course, that also
| feels like work, so then I don't do it.
| taubek wrote:
| I would say pay back the debt. Along the way you will find itmes
| that maybe are no longer of interest to you. This will reduce
| your list.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There is only so much you can do, or will do.
|
| The things that you're not going to be able to do will be
| eliminated from your list regardless of your choice(s). The
| question is whether you do this deliberately or incidentally with
| time.
|
| David Allen's _Getting Things Done_ isn 't a perfect system, and
| has flaws. That said, it's quite good, and is better than
| virtually anything else I've seen. I strongly recommend it.
|
| In an era of information abundance, what is limited is what
| information consumes: attention. (Thank Herbert Simon for that
| observation.)
|
| The other thing information consumes is _time_ , and no matter
| how much technology improves, you have only 24 hours, 14,440
| minutes, and 86,400 seconds in a day.
|
| Ultimately, where information exceeds capacity to process it,
| what is needed is _fast, cheap, and guilt-free disposal_.
| Elminiating obligations without having to think about it, and
| without regret.
|
| There are 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,765 hours in a year
| (roughly 2,000 of those are spent at work, sleep, and everything
| else, respectively).
|
| An 85 year lifespan is roughly 1,000 months, 4,500 weeks, 31,000
| days, 750,000 hours.
|
| Think of the things that you do once a week, or once a month. Do
| you read a book a week? You'll read at most 4,500 in your
| lifetime. If you've stacked up more than 4,500 books, either
| you're going to need to pick up the pace ... or you're going to
| leave most of them unread. Perhaps you'll only read a few
| sections of each. If not books, than games, videos, movies,
| articles, etc.
|
| My suggestion is _either_ to consciously select for quality, _or_
| to extract the most you can from what you do gain access to.
| Preferably some mix of both.
|
| Few of the most excellent works of all of human history were
| written in the past 24 hours. FOMO is an exceedingly misleading
| anxiety.
|
| Your time here is limited.
|
| Yes, you need to cut back.
|
| If you have a partner or someone you trust to help you with this,
| include them.
|
| Figure out your goals, what's important to you, what's
| _necessary_ (regardless of whether you like it or not). Count
| that in.
|
| Eliminate as much of your current committments as possible. If
| you can't do so by a rational method:
|
| - Elminiate by classes of accounts: entertainment, little used,
| media, etc.
|
| - Eliminate by least used.
|
| - Eliminate at random.
|
| - Cut everything. Re-add those which turn out to have been
| useful.
|
| The last approach is drastic, but _surprisingly_ effective.
|
| Yes, cut your discretionary spending. While you're at it, see if
| you can increase your income as well. Times may be tightening,
| but it _has_ been a competitive labour market.
|
| I'd suggest limiting additional storage until you can do better
| with what you have. Though the notion of ever-additional storage
| and never deleting anything is an information technology vision
| that seems increasiongly likely.
| effnorwood wrote:
| julienreszka wrote:
| just save more and use lossless compression
| dkarl wrote:
| 1. Actively maintain lists when you use them. When you want to
| watch a movie and look back at your to-watch list, delete stuff!
| A lot of times you'll put something on a list because it struck
| you a certain way in the moment, but it doesn't really deserve
| its place. Be ruthless.
|
| 2. To-do lists come in two forms: a vital, nonnegotiable, long-
| lived list and ephemeral lists that serve you for a day or a
| week. Vital items: renew car registration, send wedding invites,
| find a primary care physician. Items for an ephemeral list: wash
| the car, schedule a meeting with Bob, try that new show somebody
| mentioned. Throw away the ephemeral list after its time has
| expired. Non-essential items can only be put on an ephemeral
| list, never the long-term list.
|
| 3. Don't treat stuff as precious if you discovered it by a simple
| web search. If you think "I should watch more French movies to
| maintain the French I learned in school" and Google "best French
| films of the 21st century," don't add any bookmarks or list
| entries for what you find. You can always do the search again.
| (No, you did not accomplish anything of lasting value by reading
| through the search results and picking the ones that appealed to
| you.)
|
| 4. Don't save things expecting them to change your behavior
| tomorrow. Don't think, "I keep thinking I should learn French.
| Maybe if I put some things on my to-do list...." Every day, the
| you that exists that day will make the decisions. Next Tuesday's
| you may or may not be smarter than today's you, but odds are that
| next Tuesday's you is not very interested in what today's you
| wants them to do. Only bequeath to them information they'll
| actually value and use.
|
| 5. Use a service like Pocket to bookmark articles. I use Pocket,
| and it's great because I only see it if I go to it, and it gives
| me no indicator of how many articles I've saved. I can scroll
| back if I want to, I can search in my articles if I want to, I
| can tag them... but I don't have to do any of that.
|
| 6. Make Inbox Zero a regular hygiene task. Getting to Inbox Zero
| every day is pretty hard-core. Getting to Inbox Zero every month
| is not so bad.
|
| 7. Unsubscribe from everything. You will find so much stuff by
| seeking it out that you'll have no time to consume it all. Why,
| on top of that, would you add things coming to you passively?
|
| 8. Declare bankruptcy on non-essentials. Do go back and check for
| things you really should take care of, like tax paperwork and
| out-of-the-blue emails from friends you haven't seen in ten
| years.
| nojito wrote:
| Digital Hoarding is a real thing. I suggest reading up on how
| hoarders stop hoarding and apply them to your digital life.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Aggressive selectivity. 90% of everything is garbage, soooo.
|
| Bias toward actionable. If it isn't actionable, toss it. If it's
| actionable, but you haven't acted in some arbitrary period of
| time, toss it. For the remainder, act.
|
| Periodic ruthless purges. Does it MATTER? If you cannot identify
| a clear "Hell yes" alignment with your lived values and goals
| toward which you are actively working, toss it.
|
| Staged purging: automatically send anything older than some
| arbitrary period of time to a staging purgatory area. Anything
| that remain there beyond some other arbitrary period of time:
| toss it.
|
| Nuke: Wipe it all and start over, paying more attention (as
| above) this time.
| kazinator wrote:
| You should re-frame the list not as something that you must do,
| but as a list which captures ideas. If you have some spur-of-the-
| moment idea and don't capture it in the to-do list, you might
| forget it, for good.
|
| The list can be sorted: you can prioritize things you can
| realistically do and that you are motivated to do, by moving them
| to the top. Then you can take the perspective of the shorter
| list, which is less daunting.
|
| Split it into regions: things to do this week, things to do this
| year, ... or whatever.
|
| You can also go through the list from time to time and cull ideas
| that don't seem useful after the passage of some time. That can
| keep it smaller.
| tene80i wrote:
| Relax, be kind to yourself.
|
| The finance analogy isn't right, because debt is something you
| have to pay and these things, or at least most of them, don't
| require you to do anything.
|
| If you have too many emails to get through, yes, unsubscribe
| ruthlessly.
|
| If your storage costs too much, yes, delete ruthlessly.
|
| Now, accept that you will never make use of everything you've
| found. That doesn't matter. That's also true of libraries and the
| world in general.
|
| So don't worry about getting through them. You cannot.
|
| Just remove anything that causes problems (incoming streams,
| expensive storage), and then enjoy your curated things at
| whatever pace you feel like.
|
| You can't finish it, ever. But that doesn't mean it is a problem
| you need to solve. It means it's a selection to taste from.
| fovc wrote:
| > The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of
| scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is
| the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty
| thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories:
| those who react with "Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco,
| what a library you have ! How many of these books have you
| read?" and the others - a very small minority - who get the
| point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage
| but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than
| unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you
| don't know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the
| currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You
| will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow
| older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves
| will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the
| larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of
| unread books an antilibrary.
|
| I'd say just get a filing/search system and be happy to have a
| large antilibrary
| ftyhbhyjnjk wrote:
| It's better to read less and understand every bit of it than to
| read more and understand nothing.
|
| 99% of the "saves" that you've gathered are probably not touched
| for months, or years, or most possibly will never be touched.
| Drop them at once.
|
| Focus on the 1% that matter. Break that 1% into smaller chunks
| that you CAN read and understand. Once done, move them to your
| "archives".
|
| Divide, prioritize, and conquer. Don't fall for the trap set by
| the "marketing gurus" telling you to read 30+ books a year or
| read 10+ articles a day. You are never going to be able to
| benefit from all of that anyway.
|
| Divide, prioritize, and conquer..
| syntheweave wrote:
| The problem isn't with the amount of stuff you have, but the
| place - mentally and physically - you're putting it in.
| Organization starts by finding the dividing lines that let you
| deal with the things you are ready to deal with, which could mean
| boundaries of place(different workspaces), boundaries of time
| (scheduling), or boundaries of quality(sorting and filtering
| mechanisms).
|
| And place actually ranks higher than you might first think: doing
| different things with different machines in different locations
| allows you "set and setting": you were inclined to work in a
| certain way, therefore you keep ending up in that place. From
| that you can engage with the particular philosophy of what your
| aims are with that tool or task. If you try to integrate it all
| together there's no point of release. Information is only the
| data that you find useful, and sometimes that means getting
| distance from it.
|
| Time and filtering, in contrast, are more narrow ways of looking
| at it: that you will spend some number of hours doing "the thing"
| is only applicable to some kinds of labor, since many times what
| you actually need is a once a day check-in, an opportunity to
| start. And filters establish topical specialization; they help
| you push your investigation further, but they can be an effort to
| enforce, as the world defaults to chaotic interconnectivity.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I use a two todo lists (work and personal) each with two priority
| levels (now and backlog). Every night I prioritize the "now"
| tasks for the next day and also delete backlog tasks if I can.
|
| Reduce your spending and reduce your backlog of saved items. If
| you need motivation to delete your personal backlog tasks, try
| hackernews "past" from 1/6/12 months ago or the equivalent.
| superlopuh wrote:
| I have the same problem and I'm writing an app to help with this.
|
| I think a lot of the solution will come with personal experience
| and getting better at filtering content before it gets into the
| system. A relevant analogy is I click on way fewer HN links on
| the front page than I used to, and that's because I know the time
| to check out most topics could be better used elsewhere.
|
| I also just stopped opening Pocket one day and my life probably
| improved. Same with GMail, email bankrupcy is a good thing, just
| archive everything and move on with your life.
|
| For everything else it's a matter of having a system that lets
| you prioritise things and focus on them in order of importance.
| If you never get to the unimportant things it'll be ok.
| onion2k wrote:
| I can only answer for email, but mail rules are you friends. I
| have _many_ rules that label, categorize, archive, delete, and
| mark things as important. Almost all automated emails (receipts,
| reminders, alerts, etc) skip my inbox entirely, so I only have to
| actually think about things people send to me directly.
| Everything else gets my attention either in scheduled slots (eg
| before a stand up, or at 10am, in the case of things like Gitlab
| or JIRA emails) or just when I 've got some time (newsletters).
|
| I'm not an organized person so I get a computer to do it for me.
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