Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I used to be a heavy consumer of digital content. I was subscribed to hundreds of sources and RSS feeds first through Thunderbird, then through google reader. All of them were "learning" material (I.e. not gossip) , and it included some podcasts. I thought I was being productive with my time, and it mattered to me .

But then my mind changed, I thought about all the stuff i read about that didn't matter or that I didn't use. I changed my approach and now I try to produce more than I consume. The little stuff I read about, I try to apply it somewhere.

Also, I've started doing more things offline: I'm doing way more exercise, playing a musical instrument and even playing SNES games.

The online world started to feel too much in a hurry and "extremist" for me.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As per emails - one time I had 6month business trip and worked on customer site, used mostly my second mail account at customer's domain and rarely checked my main account - too many noise there, CC ALL, etc. When I returned back I found ~40k unread letters. So... I created separate outlook file and moved there everything from these 6 month, and never touched it. My logic was if something had anything important to ask me or share they would do it again, or already duplicated request on my second account. After a month I simply deleted that second mail file (~2gb).

When you are getting older you understand that you should balance between consuming and creating. Nobody would remember you or respect your for skillful consuming :)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Marie Kondo, but with computers ;)

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

<quote>Time management often advises people to categorize their list of ‘to do’ activities into A, B, C or D priorities. In practice, most people end up classifying 60­-70 per cent of their activities as A or B priorities. They conclude that what they are really short of is time. This is why they were interested in time management to start with. So they end up with better planning, longer working hours, greater earnestness and usually greater frustration too. They become addicted to time management, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what they do, or significantly lower their level of guilt that they are not doing enough.</quote>

My personal method might be to compare these items with each other, and pick 10-20% of them. Randomly list 10 of these and pick one that you want, and discard/archive the rest. If you ask whether you want to read/do something, the answer is always "yeah", but if you compare these with each other, you'll see a pattern. Comparing and deciding is more difficult, by the way, and it results to store less of these in time.

Whatever you do, give up the guilt first. Guilt never leads to productivity or happiness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ll be fine.

2. Delete. Flag what you need to save and delete everything else (or vice versa, filter and delete anything you don’t need). A fully clean inbox/browser will provide daily motivation to keep it clean.

3. Review all your bookmarks/tabs, etc and identify 10-20 general themes. What are you interested in? Can you start an activity or program that would allow you to review some of your favorited content in a more organic fashion?

To-do lists can be off-putting, and I doubt you would ever sit down to read through hundreds of webpages in abstraction. By applying it to a project or educational program, you will have a tangible product/outcome, and find that you don’t need as many bookmarks on that topic. (Or maybe you’ll create more.. at least, they’ll be different).

Whenever I do this, I find myself deleting about 10% of bookmarks with every new project (and adding back less than that).

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. paste the URL in the file

2. add a free-form description to it by hand

The hand-typing part proved to be a fairly good "bullshit filter": typing a description is annoying, so I ended up storing only the most relevant links, for which I was willing to write a short description in my own words. Compare that to the save-and-forget systems where storing and tagging a link takes about a second.

If you like free-form systems, there's also good ol' One Big Text File, a strangely effective solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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.

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

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

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

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

I arrange everything based on that, using a "pvsgeer" framework: purpose, vision, strategy, empowerment/execution, report/review/repeat.

I wrote some things at my web site about purpose in life (in profile, no ads or sales), whether one is religious or not. (If you want details and can't find them, you can email me--it is in the site footer.) It revolves around learning (personal growth in ability to serve one's family and others), and then service. There are important things to learn about the nature of life that also help.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Anyone know of anything like this?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

https://link.horse

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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