This is Part 1 of Martin’s Anti-Procrastination Series

Info-Hoarding, or what I sometimes like to call “Research Material” Hoarding and otherwise also known as excessive bookmarking and/or tab-hoarding and can quickly become one of your worst enemies. You’re looking for a particular topic like free WordPress themes or Photoshop tutorials and before you know it your browser is about to crash and has become awkwardly slow.

Then you realize that the amount of tabs you have opened and the information that is hidden in each of these tabs exceeds by far the amount of information that you were looking for. After all you were only looking for one place that explained everything about your desired topic.

Chances are that that you weren’t able to find this magical place – but you found so many other exciting and amazing places, all of which you had to at least consider. “Maybe all this additional information will become useful one day.” Like the webcam review, or the car foot mat stopper – that holds it from moving around, or the 10 best celebrities’ vacation homes review on YouTube. That’s all great info you stumbled upon, although totally not related to your original topic.

At this point you stop for a moment – not because you want to – there is a lag, the video about the most dangerous animals just won’t load and stopped. You realize at this point you’ve gathered enough information to read and watch for the next couple of days and you stop.

Wrong.

The fear overcomes you – what if my browser crashes now? Oh my god there are about hundred tabs I haven’t even looked at yet – I will NEVER be able to find them again!

This is usually when excessive bookmarking takes place. Quickly you add all these tabs, all these new, exciting and useful tutorials, blog posts and funny fail videos you came across on YouTube by accident, to your long bookmark list of doom. This is the infamous black hole: the moment a new bookmark is attached to it, makes it another old one disappear in a stacked mush of dusty code, never to be seen again, possibly lost forever…

If someone would make a statistic of how high the percentage is of the material we bookmark versus what we actually come back to and read fully or watch – I’m sure it will be so shockingly low that we will think twice before spending all that time searching for stuff we don’t actually need. Even when we found exactly what we were looking for we often keep going on and on – like gold diggers.

I think cautious bookmarking can help. Only one out of ten websites need bookmarking anyway. You know, those rare websites that you know you wouldn’t be able to find again. Most websites or services are only one word typed in into your favorite search engine away.

Another tip I recommend is to organize your bookmarks by topic. This way you will see if you have one particular bookmark already or if you simply have enough material about a topic – where excessive researching won’t be necessary. If you don’t organize your bookmarks you might as well delete them since you need the bookmark-search option anyway to find something again. If that’s the case you better off doing a Google search – since you will find information just as fast and it probably will be more up to date.

Does anyone else have this problem? What are some creative ways you solved the problem?