How I achieve bookmark zero every week
From newsletters, to RSS feeds, social networks, apps like Google Now and Medium, a significant amount of interesting and relevant content is delivered to you multiple times a day from a variety of sources.
Because of our busy lives, it’s nearly impossible to read every single post on the spot. If you’re like me, by the end of the week, you’ve stockpiled a nearly insurmountable mountain of shit you want to read, but have simply set aside for later.
Much in the same way that an inbox teeming with hundreds of unread messages is considered stressful and counterproductive, the habit of collecting unread articles results in loss of focus and latent anxiety. It is a modern day tragedy really.
So, after years of having my tab-filled windows silently judging me from the corner of my screen, I finally decided it was time to develop a strategy to tackle this problem for good.
Here is how I achieve bookmark zero every week:
Identify your end goal
We all read and digest content for different reasons. Some of us just want to stay informed and in the loop, while others have a very specific reason to collect knowledge. The important takeaway is to identify the reasons why you want to consume the knowledge that you do.
Personally, I crunch publications to stay up-to-date with everything surrounding web design and dev culture, while being able to go back to the interesting articles or sources of inspiration I deem relevant to my job.
This makes my golden path pretty clear and simple: gather raw content via multiple sources and digest and catalogue it into a system that I can easily search months into the future.
In the same sense, a successful conversion for me will consist of an article that I have read (or skimmed through and rejected) and then stored and tagged appropriately.
Gather up!
This is probably the most important step of all: find good content sources. Sounds simple, right? It’s not!
By choosing relevant sources, you might not realize that you are also doing yourself a big favour in pre-filtering a lot of the noise from your overworked brain. This will make your job much easier in the long run, since you’ll be perusing articles that are already very likely to be of interest.
I personally gather content from:
- Many RSS feeds in Feedly (e.g. Mind Sparkle Mag, Hey Designer)
- A variety of newsletters (e.g. Front-End Front, Hover States)
- A bunch of Medium publications and writers (e.g. FED Dead, Eric Elliot)
- A lot inspirations from the Panda dashboard
- A load of Pocket recommended articles
- A few key Twitter and Facebook follow
- The occasional Google Now suggestion
Read what you can, hide the rest
Nothing beats the satisfaction of reading an article immediately after spotting it. There is likely a strong correlation between your state of mind at a given moment, and the reasons why a particular piece of content may have sparked your interest. I recommend reading as much as possible in this ideal scenario.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons why this doesn’t always work: you don’t have the time, you’re reading a technical article on a device that requires a bigger screen, you’re in transit and can’t concentrate, I could go on.
In this case, you need a quick and straightforward way to keep track of all the articles you queue up so that you can come back to them later. Many services offer this feature. I personally use Pocket, but Evernote, Instapaper, Readability and Raindrop are also good options.
The most important thing to remember is that you need a method to get these marked articles out of your face. Snooze them away, make them disappear with the knowledge that you’ll come back to them when you’re in a better place and time to sit down and focus on the content.
Don’t let it spiral
Now that there’s an Everest-size list of articles waiting to be read, you need to make sure you have the discipline to regularly process them all. As it is for a wide array of things in life, acquiring and maintaining this strict routine is by far the biggest challenge you will face if you want to follow this technique.
From experience, this objective is easier to reach when you impose a simple set of rules on yourself to help sharpen your will and not procrastinate.
First of all, it’s primordial that you stick to some sort of schedule. For example, I’ve implemented a simple set of Inbox reminders to alert me that I have content waiting to be consumed. After a few different attempts, I finally found a combination that works well for me: a daily weekday popup at 3:30 p.m. and a last chance call on Sundays at noon.
Following a tight schedule will help you fulfill the second golden rule of not getting overwhelmed: keeping the list of articles to digest as low as possible is key. I found that having a queue of max 5 articles to read at the end of every weekday helps me get to Sunday without being completely daunted by my own doing. This helps me kickstart the week on the right foot — with a clean slate and a clear mind.
Iterate, iterate, get better!
Of course, this flow isn’t something I just woke up one day and figured out; it took me over a year to get right! For example, I now know that I can’t read in the morning. I also learned that during some periods of my life — crunch time, vacations, holidays — this technique can be more effective than usual… or sometimes not at all.
This is all part of the learning process that helps you figure out what’s best for you. Finding your balance, although it sounds tiring, can also be exciting.
End
As you can see, achieving bookmark zero requires discipline and, sometimes, hard work. On the other hand, bringing a bit of structure into content chaos can be immensely rewarding on both a personal and professional level.
Just like training, writing or calling your parents on the weekends, you need to force it into your routine until it becomes second nature.
Now, go save this article, tag it with “awesome, bookmark, tips, life hack” and zip along to the next one in the list! Good luck.
