Too Many Read-it-laters Everywhere
The Internet is a giant information creating and consuming cosmos. Some say that a modern person receives far more information in a day than a medieval person does in their entire life. I believe it's far underestimated.
I often run into interesting articles or websites on the Internet. But I don't always have time to read them immediately so I save them somewhere to read them later. Here is the problem, they are everywhere.
I save them in my Obsidian vaults, my Anytype, my Chrome browser reading list or even a simple link in a simple txt file in my self-hosted cloud storage. I find them hard to find when someday I'm reading something interesting or having a conversation with my friends, then "damn there was an article about this topic I read about but I forget where it is" happens.
This is a serious problem. It lets some important ideas drift away when I'm focusing on looking for something related. Then I did a little statistical analysis. Turns out that there are:
- 51 unread pages saved in my Chrome's reading list;
- 11 links in my Obsidian vault;
- 249 watch it later videos on Bilibili and 62 on Youtube;
- 234 unread books in my reading app (and hundreds uncountable in OneDrive);
- 48 unread emails, 20 unread newsletters
And there are more in somewhere I can't even remember. There are also hundreds of books and movies (mostly noted as title) I want to watch in the future.
Two main problems: too many read-it laters, and they are everywhere.
It feels like an unbearable burden to me. To solve these problems one by one, I had tried a few principles: read those important or urgent articles first. But I still felt a lot of stress because they often require a huge amount of cognitive-bandwidth. Later I changed it to reading some simple ones after reading a difficult one. I always got stuck in a cycle of constantly reading simple ones.
I finally decided to follow my heart. Just read or watch whatever I like. Those hard articles won't disappear, I will read them later anyway.
The other problem seems more urgent to me. I have to collect all the pieces into one place (or two places) in order to solve my first problem. The best way is to put them all in my Obsidian vault because I can use Obsidian anytime, anywhere, in any device.
This is quite easy for me to do. List all locations. Iterate through each device. Ditch those outdated. Copy and paste them into my vault. Voilà! I feel way better now. The first problem seems not that hard to me now.
Day 34.
related article:
- Close open loops by Andy Matuschak