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GTD: Zero Bookmarks in my Browser

Posted on August 14, 2008
Filed Under gtd |

As you might have guessed I’m in Getting Things Done mode. So after setting up my personal wiki, the new home for my weekly reviews, I turned my attention to the browser. I spend a hell of lot of time in my browser so I decided to spend a few minutes seeing if I’m using it well.

When I first started using a web browser I was taught to bookmark pages and organise them into folders that are hierarchically structured into a tree-like form. For the last couple of years though I’ve found bookmarks in a browser to be a complete pain for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, I use a three browsers: IE, Safari (& with the latest webkit.org) and Firefox. Safari is my favourite, Firefox has the best tools and IE is what I use on customer sites. Firefox is what I call my default browser because it’s has everything I need to work effectively. Firebug, mouse gestures, scrapbook, foxmarks, tree style tab, piclens and delicious to name a few. If Safari could do all of these, I’d use Safari for sure, but it doesn’t.
• Secondly, I cannot stand the pain of keeping bookmarks synchronised across different browsers. I know about plugins to synchronise bookmarks across different instances of the same browser (e.g. foxmarks) but not different browsers. Also, I don’t think I would use it anyway.
• Thirdly, organising bookmarks into a tree is just not an effective way to manage large numbers of urls. Ugly and usable.

The typical way I work when moving about on the web is that when I land on a page, I have two options: save this page or not. If I choose to save this page and i have not read it, I need to record that fact as well. That is why I am big fan of tagging bookmarks and delicious (particularly since its recent upgrade and better url delicious.com) is my choosen vehicle for doing this. So here’s what I do:

• Do some stuff on the web (I’m in my default browser Firefox)
• If I want to save the current page, Command-D to bring up the delicious plugin
• I add my tags and if I’ve not read it I add a notread tag

All done in 5 seconds from the keyboard, no mouse. At the end of each week, I ruthlessly step through my notread pages in delicious and either read or delete them. I very rarely have anything from the previous week taken over into the next. And that’s it.

So, last week I visited every page I had as a bookmark in my browser and added them either to my personal wiki or delicious. Not surprisingly, I got rid of 90% of my bookmarks (note to self, tip to spring clean bookmarks within delicious). Now I have Zero Bookmarks within my browser. The first thing people say, no bookmarks in your browser, but what if you’re offline. Well, if I’m offline, I can’t access delicious but even if I could, I couldn’t access the sites at the end of bookmarks anyway. And for the local links, well, there’re in my personal wiki, which has a great home page with about 20 links to my favourite, most visited sites. Of course, my personal wiki home page is my most visited page.

So what does my browser have? Well, a couple of bookmarklets for gReader (adds the current page to my google rss reader), Twurl (converts the current page into a tiny url and lets me post to twitter) and delicious (for tagging and saving the current page).

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