First, lets take a count of your open tabs as well as ‘Pocket’ like tools which are marked ‘Read Later’.
Post the creation of Insta Paper, everyone wanted to read their information in a clean way, those who cannot tried to push it to their Kindles or Evernote. These people read a lot and wanted to read a lot. When you push to other devices, you may lose count on what you need to read.
What I have realized is that
Reading and Watching makes you do less Writing (be it code or language)
I was this person about an year ago till a friend talked me down. Its really really impossible to keep up in realtime about Javascript frameworks, Apple Rumors, what changed where and when its being released.
I have heard in podcasts, seen and read about people that
- have tens (even 50+) of open tabs and complain about how Chrome / Firefox is hogging the memory
- Some wish for the browser to crash so that they happily forget (eventually people reach this from above)
- Some keep their browser clean with pushing the stuff to read into Pocket like tools.
The Read Later tools are for whom who have lots of spare time on weekends and clear off their tabs and read list in a week or two. If you keep something for later, it gets missed and forgotten leading it into the virtual blackhole. This is a reality whether you like it or not. This happens a lot when you are researching.
For those interested in the math, 10s of HN new posts every four hours will pile up to 40 or so in a week (at the least), averaging to 8 on weekdays.
When you mark an article as ‘Read Later’, its telling the tool to remind you to forget about it
The Solution - An fixed size array
Write stuff you can’t remember and maintain a list of top 50 things you want to read online at any point of time in each section. If you want to read new stuff in Java or Go or Linux or about politics, spend the time then or add to your fixed size array, not a queue, not a stack, not a linked list. Just close it off once its done.
Keeps you 😴 better at night.