TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load. I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know...
TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load.
I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know nothing in detail. So I bookmark so that I can return to the same articles regularly instead so that I can 1) stay informed with more depth rather than breadth and 2) contribute to online discourse when I see a gap.
I'm using bookmark folders (by topic) for articles I want to refer back to regularly, and the built in "reading list" for things I do want to come back to but don't plan to keep a record of.
But my bookmarks are overflowing because of all the other stuff I have folders for (admin logins, shopping, local services, social sites, online office stuff, literature and languages, fun stuff, etc).
I also bookmark folders for these:
- Politics (local/national)
- Environment
- Human rights issue #1
- Human rights issue (n) ...
These basically have 1) compelling facts in support of the issue or 2) important memorable counter statements to common misinformation.
But I get easily lost among clutter, and I contend with brain fog. I've seen stuff about "second brain" online, but to be honest they're way too complicated for me (raindrop.io synced with this and that...). Is the folder system I'm using as good as it gets for people like me who need to avoid complexity?
I'm currently on macOS & iOS but plan to return to linux when I next upgrade in a few years.
Update: thanks so much for the recommendations. I've started using Wallabag to get essential articles organised and categorised with tags. This helps me remember their contents better and retrieve them more quickly.
I'm also experimenting with Obsidian in parallel to see if it makes it easier or more challenging to do the same thing. It's the ideas within the articles I want to remember rather than just the headline, and some articles have a lot of different but useful information (for example, today I learned that if you earn more than roughly $33,000 per year, you are in the top 1% on the planet - one third of people on the planet live on $10 per day.). That was in an article about sustainable production and consumption, so the headline itself wouldn't necessarily help me remember that this is the article where that factoid lives.
I have start.me bookmarked too and plan to keep my top 30 articles there.
At some point I'll probably reduce the options from 3 down to 2 or 1. But whichever choice I go with, it's already much, much better than what I was doing before. Thanks again!