While I was dealing with the lost inbox on the mac, I decided to go ahead and go through most of my FeedOnFeeds subscriptions and “mark all read”. Because FoF only has two states, read and unread, what happens is that the things I want to keep around to either potentially blog about later or look up stay as marked unread. Eventually, a lot of them pile up. When there are too many, I can’t just do the “view new items” because that page will be too huge to be usable. At that point, I have lost the value of the tool. So, the 100 articles from BoingBoing I had been saving – gone. The 87 things I was keeping around from Gapers Block – all read. The decks are cleared and now I plan on either keeping up with it or doing the same periodically.
I need to be less anal retentive. None of this stuff disappears from the web if I mark it as read, I can always find it later. In truth, I never will look for it because there will be new stuff that fills in behind it. I must get over the mindset that each bit of information is precious, just as I must do the same with my possessions. That’s how I end with with inboxes and aggregators full of things I’ll never look at, and a house full of things I’ll never use. It is so hard to change the habits of a lifetime, but I want to so badly.
