I am also asked to defend my habit again and again. And so I have long struggled and meditated on this problem. What I ultimately decided is that a repository o

I am also asked to defend my habit again and again. And so I have long struggled and meditated on this problem. What I ultimately decided is that a repository of bookmarks or open tabs, or of any kind of knowledge, is useless as a static collection and quickly degenerates into a backlog never to be accessed again. I abandoned my humongous Delicious account and have since been developing a little something that offers a different take on the subject. I have been saving dumps of my open tabs' urls into files for years now, to preserve my sanity, knowing I would one day get around to the right solution to my own ailment. My take on the problem is action-oriented browsing. I think that anything you clip or save or note down must have an intended action, now or in the future. Maybe you are saving a bookmark because you want to refer to it when you tackle some personal project you want to do someday/maybe. It must then be triggered by that project when you finally get to it. If you never get to it, the bookmark will die with the project, which is just as well. Most bookmarks will never be accessed again, but you don't know which ones yet. It's the long tail principle. We don't have time to do everything we want, but in the spirit of GTD, ideally we'd like to map out all that we could want to do, so we can always (say, weekly) review our priorities and be ready to pivot into new directions if situations, or our minds, change. Even if you are only saving a cute picture of a cat, it is still actionable. Why are you saving it? That's the key question. It may be because you want to show it to some people, so it should be triggered in your next interaction with each of those people, and then you're done with that bookmark and you can let go of it. Articles that you want to read or reread should by triggered by a reading list, or by study plans for particular subjects, or even by a blog post you want to write on the ideas you read on several of these articles. It's all about what should trigger that bookmark to come into your attention again. You shouldn't need to remember to check it back on your own, or you may well never do.