Why You Must Stop Bookmarking Articles to Read
You’ll never get to the end of that list
I spent the better part of yesterday cleaning up my list of bookmarks/ saved articles on Medium. Ever since I became active on the platform last July, I managed to bookmark over 450 articles to ‘read later.’
Guess how many of them I actually managed to read, absorb and implement: around 25.
You’ve heard of Tsundoku, right? It’s the Japanese term for collecting so many books that you leave unread.
Tsundoku is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them.
Buying books does not equal reading books. We all know that. Yet, so many of us end up victims of Tsundoku anyway. The same rule can be applied to bookmarked articles.
When I whittled down my reading list to zero, it was as if I was given a fresh new slate to start over, and here’s what I have learned from my obsessive bookmarking habit.
Saving is not the same as Doing
You will spend more time bookmarking than actually reading the content. And that’s a problem especially when it comes to progress. Once again that’s not a rule that is restricted to articles.
Think about every course you’ve ever signed up for, in the past. You may have done it because it was on sale, on a limited-time offer or perhaps you just enjoy every single thing that the course creator releases.
That isn’t a bad thing, by itself. But the challenge becomes one of Tsundoku again. Buying a course or saving an article to read later becomes problematic because we assume that just taking that action alone has made us productive.
It’s like ticking off a habit tracker every day that you thought about going to the gym, instead of actually going to the gym and working out there.
The former gives you the high of having accomplished something (which is nothing, if you think about it). The latter will actually move you forward on your fitness journey.
It’s the standard fallacy of being busy versus being productive.
You will never get to the end of that reading list
That’s a fact. Every time you bookmark an article to read later, you’re unwittingly adding to the length of your never-ending reading list.
In a world that already competes for so much of our attention, why would you consciously give it more leverage to do so? The anxiety of never being able to read all of the articles, all of the books, all of the brilliant ideas can result in a great deal of FOMO. Yes, FOMO isn’t just restricted to social media and technology.
That’s why it’s time to put autonomy back where it belongs — your hands.
You have a choice not to save/bookmark/read later.
Instead, here’s what I do these days. If I find an article compelling enough or fascinating enough, I open it in a distraction-free window — you can enable that with an extension like Reader Mode. Then, I read the entire article and take notes then and there.
The Information Will Find You
This realization came to me, especially when I was very active on my Instagram channel. One of the things I would do pretty often was bookmark or save posts to read later. I’d then pride myself on the fact that I’d used quick thinking to save the article.
But when push came to shove and when I needed the information in a hurry, what did I do? Did I go to my list of saved Instagram bookmarks? No, I went to a search engine, typed out my query and got my answer instead.
This reminds me that none of the information in the world wide web is actually hidden from me. It’s always there, available for the taking.
Bookmarking an article implies that I won’t be able to find it later. But the truth is I don’t need to find it later.
When I am ready, when the time is right, the information will find me.
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