Stop Collecting, Start Digesting: What Cleaning Bookmarks Taught Me

This is probably very familiar: You’re scrolling, something useful catches your eye, and you think, “I’ll save this for later.” Then you keep scrolling, and later never comes. I did this on LinkedIn and other platforms for many years and never went back to any of them.

It is very natural given the amount of information we are bombarded with. In a flood of content, bookmarking feels productive. You find something useful and want to dive deep. You could take five minutes to figure out whether you actually need it, but you are programmed to think there is something more interesting if you keep scrolling, and getting that dopamine from the post in front of you feels like a lot of work. So you end up saving it and promise yourself that future you will take care of the rest. Except future you is also busy scrolling.

So we keep collecting information we MIGHT need, while the information that is useful to us right now sits in a tab, waiting for attention it never gets.

At some point I realized that this behavior had been making me procrastinate more. I already had enough. I had consumed enough content. I didn’t need more posts. I needed to actually read the ones I had already saved.

Cleaning up my bookmarks

Over a few weekends, I opened my LinkedIn and browser bookmarks and went through all of them, one by one. Some of them were years old. There was a thread of resources for learning system design, a list of VCs sorted by the industries they invest in, a founder’s breakdown of how they got their first 100 customers, a pile of essays I had been meaning to read, and products I was sure I’d try someday.

The first thing I noticed was how many of them I didn’t care about. I hadn’t bookmarked them because they were useful. I had bookmarked them because I felt like it in the moment. Those were easy to delete.

Some of them, though, were goldmines. They gave me project ideas, essay ideas, and quotes that I still go back and read every once in a while. Those went into notes on my computer.

By the end, I had deleted every single bookmark. My LinkedIn saves and my browser bookmarks are both empty, and everything worth keeping now lives in my own notes.

How I go through each bookmark

I follow the same steps for every bookmark:

1. Read it. Whether it is a post, an essay, or a product page, I read it properly instead of skimming through it.
2. Throw out the noise. If I am not interested in it anymore, I delete it. If I have to think for more than 30 seconds about whether to keep it, I delete it too. I don’t feel guilty about it.
3. Write it in my own words. Instead of copying it, I rewrite what stuck with me, similar to the Feynman technique. It is okay to miss some details since I am not studying for an exam. For long articles and papers, I don’t try to recreate the whole thing. I write a short summary of what I took away from it and add a link to the source at the bottom.
4. Connect it to what I already have. If it is related to one of my existing notes, I add it there. That way, all the related information stays together for when I need it.
5. If it is actionable, create an action item. Then I act on it when I have time. For a product, the action item can be as simple as trying it out.

For instance, I am learning about startup funding these days, and I had saved a post that listed VCs by the industries they invest in. Instead of leaving it in my bookmarks, I looked up the firms that fit what I am building, sent them connection requests on LinkedIn, and wrote them down in my startup notes. A post that I had ignored for months turned into a real next step.

Writing something in my own words makes me invested in it. Once I spend a few minutes thinking about an idea, it is no longer just someone else’s writing. It becomes something I care about, and when I care about something, I am much more likely to act on it.

Since then

I still bookmark things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Sometimes we are busy and sometimes we are not, and both are completely normal.

What works for me is to bookmark things when I don’t have time and review them every other weekend. As I keep doing this, I develop a clearer taste for what I actually want. As a result, I bookmark less, which means less work the next time.

There is also a side benefit that I didn’t expect. Before, the things I was interested in were scattered across LinkedIn saves, browser bookmarks, and other apps. Now they are all in one place, in plain notes on my own computer. When I need something, I don’t have to go through a list of apps to find it.

I have enough content. What I need now is to digest what I have already collected.

The information I needed was never in the next post. It had been sitting in my bookmarks all along.