I’m not a minimalist by any stretch, but I do like getting rid of clutter. If I don’t want to save something or I’m not going to use it again, out it goes. Even books—it’s very satisfying to leave books in Little Free Libraries all over town to find their next ideal reader.
There are a couple areas where decluttering is not a priority for me. One is notebooks. I have enough blank books to last me the rest of my life, probably. Will that stop me from picking up the next one I find with a nifty cover or useful pockets, pen loops, or closure bands? Absolutely not.
The other area is bookmarks. Not physical bookmarks, although I do have quite a few of those. (I bought a special edition of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department because it came with a nifty metal bookmark.) I mean web bookmarks. I keep bookmarks for the usual things—the bank, the electric bill, the internet bill, bills bills bills—but I also have bookmarks for short stories that I may end up assigning in my science fiction creative writing class, bookmarks for magazines where I think I may have a shot at placing a short story, writing conferences, fellowships, resources for teaching, book marketing, and recipes. (I am still in search of the perfect salmon recipe.)
For more than a decade, I’ve kept all those bookmarks organized in Pocket, a web-based bookmark tool that allows you to access your bookmark list from anywhere: your phone, your computer, your tablet, and so on. It was awesome.
So naturally, it’s going away.
Mozilla announced it’s shutting down the service in July, and that if you want to keep your content you have to download it. Naturally, I did. And now I have a spreadsheet of upwards of six thousand bookmarks that I’ve saved over the years. A lot of them I haven’t read. Many of them I probably don’t need. No doubt some of them link to webpages that no longer exist.
So, I’m on the lookout for a replacement service, since a spreadsheet of six thousand URLs is not portable or user friendly. Will I keep it anyway? Most likely.