I recently got an email from a reader my blog (thank you for reading and reaching out!) who asked me how I keep track of my bookmarks. The short answer is: I don’t. Not in the traditional sense. I don’t really “bookmark” anything anymore.

What I actually keep is a pile of short(ish) notes on all sorts of subjects, and those all live in Bear, tagged as topics with relevant nested tags.

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I used to be one of those people who clipped full web articles into Evernote and bookmarked every website I ever liked. Articles, quotes, screenshots, recipes, all of it went in there.

At some point I realised I was hoarding information I’d never look at again, although it is now fun to occasionally find a full article someone once wrote on a blog that’s long gone, still sitting there in my Evernote backup.* *

These days I keep far less, but even with that shift I still have over 2,000 notes in Bear. They’ve built up over the years: little observations, bits of learning, snippets from books, random thoughts I didn’t want to lose.

How I Organise Things

Everything gets tagged by topic. That’s my whole system. If something feels worth keeping, I’ll drop it into Bear, tidy it up a little, and add the tag or tags it belongs with. Occasionally I’ll add backlinks to connect related notes, but I don’t force it. Some topics get deep enough that I end up with a dedicated tag I keep adding to until the “obsession” fades.

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I’ve tried a bunch of “proper” bookmarking tools over the years. Pocket. Readwise Reader. Raindrop. Also my web browser. Without fail, they all turned into giant holding bins of things I meant to read “one day.”

However, the time to read an article truly is the moment you encounter it or the moment you search for it. Everything else is not relevant now and will probably never be read again. It just adds to mental and digital clutter and overwhelm.

Over the years, I learned to delete everything I saved to read later. And now, even when I still send articles to Readwise Reader, I am 99% sure I’ll end up deleting them later, unread.

Saved links without context just become clutter. If something grabs me enough to keep, I’d rather save the idea in my notes, with the URL for credit.

That works for me because it feels like I’m tending to something, not piling things up. A note has to earn its place. If it’s not worth the small effort of processing and tagging, I probably don’t need it.

That said, I completely understand the appeal to save and bookmark, esp. that tools like Reader or Raindrop make it so easy to do that.

Been there, done that.

Admittedly, I still have a “links” tag as a nested tag under the main #resources tag in Bear, where I save links to websites on various topics that I’d like to explore at some point. There are 38 notes under that tag as of today, and today was the first time I checked it in a year. When I need something or a website to access, I just search it.

What I have instead

I still read a few newsletters that go straight into my Yahoo “Subscribed” folder.

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I also subscribe to a lot of personal blogs like mine via RSS Feeder, and while I don’t read everything all the time, Feeder lets me quickly scan and dip into whatever catches my attention. It feels nice and low-pressure. Take it or leave it. And it’s free. If I read something I want to save, I do it right away by adding it to Bear and processing it there.

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I think I’ll take some time to round up all my newsletters and my current RSS subscriptions in a blog post. Seeing everything in one place gives it a bit more context and a sense of quantity.

I actively unsubscribe from everything I don’t need or am no longer interested in.

And I don’t “bookmark.” Not really. Not anymore.