grouping by timeframe [09/14/2007 20:47:31]
I'm going through some bookmark burnout here. My bookmark collection is the last major pile of unsorted "stuff" I need to organize, but it's taking forever.
Some of the stuff I've bookmarked is actionable, but mostly in the someday/maybe category, and none of it was organized by project.
Some of my bookmarks are filed under topics, but I hardly ever go back and looked in those folder.
Most of them are just unsorted bookmarks.
I can't believe how many links I used to bookmark, back when I read reddit everyday. Now that I'm on a schedule, I only read blogs I've subscribed to (in google reader), and use LeechBlock to limit my surfing to scheduled break times. The upshot is I don't surf much at all anymore, and I don't really miss it.
But I still have all these bookmarks to go through.
I'm deleting most of them. The rest, I'm trying to organize in terms of projects, which are organized in terms of timeframe:
- active - having to do with my current personal test cases
- near term - stuff I want to get to in the next 1-3 months.
- future - stuff I definitely want to do, but not in the next 1-3 months.
- maybe - stuff I might or might not do
- reference - stuff that doesn't apply to a particular action
I used the same scheme for sorting all the notecards I'd piled up (I'm constantly writing ideas on index cards, and had a 3 or 4 inch stack), the stack of paper on my desk, and all my electronic documents on all my various computers.
I would like to have everything in one centralized system, the way Getting Things Done recommends, but it's just not realistic right now. So instead, I have:
- a set of physical folders
- a set of disk drive folders
- a set of bookmark folders
- a master outline
All of these use the same timeframe groupings. The idea is I can apply different levels of organization depending on how soon I plan to get to stuff:
- plan active stuff in detail
- prioritize and the near term actions
- don't bother sorting the future/maybe stuff
- keep the reference stuff organized by topic
The idea is that as I clear out the the active and near term stuff, I'll begin moving things from the future folders into the present folders during some kind of weekly or monthly goal setting process.