This is part of a series. You can check out the original post called Chipping away at my Reading List, where you’ll also find the other posts. At the time of writing, my reading list is 355 items.
Part 1: It’s Deletin’ Time
First thing’s first - I need a single source of truth of consumable content. Not links to some hot take title, or social media posts with potentially useful resources. They need to be consumable and actionable so that as a part of my morning routine at work I might be able to knock some out. Thus far, that list has been in To Do so lets make that the SSOT.
I’ll do some indiscriminate deleting first to make some room for new content. I’ll delete the following:
- Anything more than two years old that isn’t immediately interesting.
- Any piece of content about something I’m not currently using.
- Anything non-tech related, though it might survive in another list somewhere else.
Some Notes
This didn’t work out like I’d hoped for a few reasons. But there were also some interesting patterns.
- Most of my content was from the same day, namely 15 May 2020. I knew some of these articles were added in 2016ish, but I think I migrated to To Do from its predecessor, Wunderlist, on that day. The two-year cutoff suddenly became much more difficult.
- There were a lot of twitter links. I know at some point (might have even been a new years’ resolution for me), I decided to learn to use Bookmarks in Twitter instead of linking to tweets. Many people in the industry quit the platform and deleted their tweets as they went. So these were easy to delete, but annoying to vet.
- I read a lot less about Design Systems. I worked almost exclusively on design systems and designer/developer tooling back when the first readings appeared in my list. I’ve since generalised more, but keep a keen interest. The content from back then is still kind of relevant, but the discipline has moved in quick strides since.
- There are a lot of Management articles. Most survived. They’ve kept their relevance. People skills retain value.
- The list was mostly tech. Even the “Stuff I’m not using” rule maybe only applied to 5 or 6 articles. I was somewhat diligent.
How it went
Not like I’d hoped, but the Readings list is down to 168 items. That brings the grand total down to 316. That’s an article a day, plus room for vacation days! Though I think the next step will blow that number up…
