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About a month or so ago I moved to a new Mac. I had the option of porting over all my bookmarks, starting fresh, or sorting them out. I took a lazy Sunday and s
by iamben 6y ago
About a month or so ago I moved to a new Mac. I had the option of porting over all my bookmarks, starting fresh, or sorting them out. I took a lazy Sunday and sorted through ~7000 bookmarks I'd accumulated in the 7 years I had the previous Mac.
About 50% of the sites or pages were now offline. 45% were irrelevant to me, either because I was no longer interested, they'd been superseded by something better, or they were outdated code snippets or examples, etc. 3% I (finally) read or skimmed, none of these changed my life. 2% were useful sites, mostly collections of things (stock imagery, audio samples) I would struggle to find in Google now or I don't manually type in frequently. I added keywords to the titles (you can't tag in Chrome) and sorted them into folders.
I was also a tab monster. I'd have ~150 or open at all times (thanks Great Suspender!) - usually things I wanted to read later or come back to.
I drew a line - tabs get 48 hours and then they're closed. Websites only get bookmarked if they contain something likely to last and I'd struggle to find if I Googled again. Both the tabs and the bookmarks created unnecessary mental load. Every suspended tab and "read me later" bookmark became another weight around my neck that screamed "still haven't got around to me, eh? Fail!" Now I'm working to the "read it asap or act on it asap - or it's not something you _really_ wanted." I guess a kind of Marie Kondo for my head, which is really rather freeing.
Perhaps Memex is a good middle ground. A chance to drag up the past as and when _my life_ is ready for it, without the future affecting the present. I'll give it a go.