I’ve been going through my “to read”, “to watch”, “to do”, and “to listen” bookmarks on Delicious over the last couple of days, which have suffered from neglect for far too long. I’ve added those tag to far too many items without thinking about it, and next thing I knew it was 2011 and I had hardly put a dent in the things on those tags. It was time to clean them out.
So yesterday I started going through the toread items. Some of them I really do mean to read one day, as they were lists of books that I mean to go through and pick out the best of. Other links were articles or stories that I had bookmarked because I didn’t have the time or the attention span to read the entire thing in one sitting. Others are articles I keep meaning to reread at a more appropriate time of my life. Some things are still waiting to be read, but I’m okay with that. I managed to cut nearly thirty items from the toread tag, and I’ll be culling more over the next few days when more chances to sit down and read come.
The todo tag had me scratching my head. There were articles whose contents I already knew, items I had bookmarked for reference in the near future that I never got around to, to do applications (which made perfect sense to tag as todo), and things that may have interested me three years ago, but the me of today wonders when I would ever want to do such a thing. Make a table out of magazines? Sounds cool, but when did I ever think I’d do that? I must have bookmarked it when I had scores of magazines in my closet. Eliminating articles like these knocked over forty articles off the todo tag. There’s still work to be done in the todo category, but I consider this progress.
The towatch and tolisten tags are less crowded than the toread and todo tags, but they’ll also take longer to clean out, partly because you can’t skim audio. Some of these items will be sitting for awhile because they are movies that I’ll have to seek out, but a lot of them are things I can watch now. To the tubes I go.
I learned something while doing this exercise. Delicious is definitely not a reliable short term to-do list for me. I found myself reading three-year-old articles for the first time yesterday. This needs to happen less often. Maybe I’ll make a monthly ritual of cleaning out all my to* tags after this purge is finished.