Information Creator or Consumer?
1. A Bloated Bookmarks Folder
Today, while cleaning up my Edge browser bookmarks, I checked the stats and found I had nearly 1,640 saved URLs. That honestly surprised me. If I spend 20 minutes on average to study one bookmark, that is more than 500 hours. Even if I spend one free hour a day, it would take two years to get through them all.
Some of those bookmarks were for work, but I still have far too many saved items for tech and hobbies. For IT-related links alone, I split them into nearly twenty subfolders: cloud-native, big data, frontend, 3D development, UI/UE, project management, and so on. There are simply too many great articles out there. Every time I see one, I reflexively save it, hoping I will have time later—or that it will help when I run into a problem.
But in reality, I admit most of these bookmarks have been gathering dust. After enough time passes, even if you do face a problem, you may not remember that the answer is sitting in your bookmarks.
A bloated bookmarks folder is also a perfect illustration of entropy: things drift from order to disorder, and it takes extra energy to restore order (i.e., spending time organizing bookmarks).
2. About Having a Sense of Goal
At work, I often use a phrase: a sense of goal. The three soul-searching questions are: what am I doing, why am I doing it, and what does "done" look like? In recent years, people love internet buzzwords like "align the granularity," but goals also need alignment. Daily standups and wrap-ups are, at their core, about aligning goals at the team level. Managers worry most when someone lacks goal clarity and does not know what a task should look like when finished—whether it is as small as a UI screen or as large as a full project deliverable. All those processes and templates exist largely to keep everyone aligned.
I think, at least for now, my bookmark management lacks goal clarity. It is a failure. Even old ladies who rummage through cardboard at least make money by selling it. I have accumulated all these bookmarks, but aside from guilt about unread items, they have no meaning—because there is no real output.
3. About Output
In an age of information explosion, it is easy to come across a great essay, a useful technical article, or a deep video. For a curious person like me, the act of discovery itself can be exciting.
I do not deny that such information can broaden your horizon, lift your mood, or shock you in a good way. But in most cases, that is where it ends. You did not actually create anything. It is pseudo-work.
A more effective approach is to bookmark with a question in mind, or to create based on your bookmarks—write a short takeaway, record a video, and so on.
Only then will you notice: do you really care about what you saved, or was it just momentary curiosity? If it is the latter, there is no point saving it. You are merely an information consumer. If you accept everything, you will eventually get indigestion.
4. Forty-Eight Hours
I am going to set a rule: if I save something, I must produce some takeaway or creation within 48 hours.
If I do not look at new bookmarks within 48 hours, the probability is high that they will start gathering dust.
Finally, when I have time, I want to explore using AI agents to optimize bookmark management, because a bookmarks folder is essentially "a crawler + a knowledge base".