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 316 items.
Part 2: Chewing through Twitter Bookmarks
A few years ago I realised that I “Liked” a lot of content on Twitter when what I meant to do was save it for later. So I started Bookmarking tweets a lot. At the time of writing, that list stood at 89. It looks like:
- threads of useful websites and resources
- giant threads that should have been long form articles
- tweets I should have actually just “liked” but for some reason wanted to refer back to
- actual articles I wanted to read but didn’t add to my reading list
After having gone through the list briefly, this felt like a whole other task. Reading list, and dealing with bookmarks…
Also, the bookmarking feature is not much more useful than simply saving a tweet for later. I have no way to organise or easily navigate the things I’ve bookmarked. But at least they’re saved.
My plan of attack:
- Anything I saved to read later gets added to the reading list.
- There are many things I saved to refer back to. These should live somewhere else, like a list of resources.
- Unroll threads if they are long-form content, and consider step 1. If it is a list, consider 2.
- The bookmarks list should be kept short; Ideally empty. Delete everything I’m done with.
Some Notes
- I save stuff related to other parts of my career or interests. There is a lot of non-tech content compared to my reading list.
- I really struggled to unbookmark stuff, except for the articles I moved to my reading list. This is especially true due to the first point.
- I can’t easily create one list of resources, especially due to the first two points. Its very hard to organise them in a way where the lists become useful resources themselves. Its almost like this is the best place for all of these to live.
How it went
Depends on your perspective.
The bookmarks list was far too eclectic to organise, and far too niche to just replace with something else. In my head, I had two ways to resolve this problem. I could either treat this like a separate reading list and assess each bookmark systematically each day, or I could just… Ignore it.
Don’t count it in my list of readings, and just get better at assessing things to add to my reading list in future. Given it was less work, and probably a better use of my time, I decided on the latter.
I added 3 articles to the readings list, and a few were already on there, so my to-do list of readings alone sits at 171. But, once you remove the bookmarks from the overall list, it brings the grand total down to 230. Still not great, but things are starting to feel more approachable.
