9999+ saved for later

How many bookmarks are stored in your browser?
How many films and serials have you watched over the past few years?
How many youtube videos have you opened in the last week?
How many news stories have you read in the last couple of days (inclusive with the ones that were sent to you in social networks and spam chats)?

I think that most of us have answers to some of these questions in tens, hundreds, or even thousands. Personally, I have the worst deal with RSS-aggregators. It is much easier to simply press the asterisk and think that the article is already half read than to actually read it, much less read it and understand something.
')


From time to time I go to trainings. Not only technical, but also for the development of other qualities. 9 out of 10 such trainings \ seminars \ lectures are something that I will never need, and I can safely get him out of my head forever. But for the sake of one remaining I am ready to continue to attend events, 90% of which I don’t need. At my last training, I found out about myself an interesting thing, which had been coming to for quite some time. Probably, most of us have heard that modern society is a society of consumers and the very process of consumption is unleashed. It is beneficial for countries, corporations, masons , for society to consume - and the more the better. This is mainly shown in material goods. Today, the one who has more cars, money, factories, oil, and startups has achieved success. But the other side of consumption - the consumption of information is often not perceived as the same serious and widespread problem. And dependence on this may seem like a delusion at all. Until we find it in ourselves.


Feedly, evernote, plugin for bookmarks - everyone collects their own junk in their own way. Many of us have a tool for accumulating something that is not a fact that we will ever return. And what is the real reason why we save articles for later? It would seem that it is wonderful that a person wants to learn something new, to supplement his knowledge. But how often do we go back to “saved” and reread? Personally, I have long noticed that I add much more there, leaving for later than I delete from there.

What to do with it

Some time ago I had a few weeks of free time, and I decided to spend it on removing everything that I had persistently saved for later years. I got the following processing algorithm:

• The first stage - to count, it turned out more than 6 thousand different articles.
• The second is to remove the excess. It took me several days, and I deleted more than a thousand entries. The main reason for the deletion was that it is no longer interesting to me or it is no longer relevant.
  
• The third point is the classification. The only thing I came up with in order to be able to remove from the "marked" and not lose anything is to break everything into types, add tags.
  
• Fourth - try not to add to “save for later” and remove (re-read) from what is already with the tag. Then my algorithm broke.

And I realized how much I got hooked on collecting information.


At school, while reading Gobsek (Balzac's work on the usurer and stinginess) I could not understand how anything can be collected or collected. What's the point of this? It seemed completely stupid. And now, looking at my thousands of headers on the aggregator site, I again try to click on “save for later”. And while not sure how to deal with it. And existing solutions are mainly aimed at adding more, not deleting.