I am certain I’m not the only one who does this: Find an interesting article online, or a product to look at in more detail later, and whack it into the Reading List feature of the Safari browser. [This is assuming you are on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone.]
Once I do that, I completely forget to reference those ever-so-important things again. My brain is convinced its dealt with the information, having diligently filed it with all the other ever-so-important things. The mountain of links grows and grows, and I’m totally convinced things are just fine.

One of the tasks Pete has been tackling for months is getting his own reading list under control. Now, his level of lack of control is something I can only dream of possessing, but in his head, he had an information problem. As I’m writing this, he’s got about 30 items in his reading list. I’m down to 547 after spending ALL DAMN DAY very quickly assessing, speed-reading, saving to Pinterest, and deleting from my whopper of a total of 933 unread items. Approximately 41% of my reading pile is now dealt with. Phew. I need gin.

Now, I was completely happy as a pig in poop having no earthly idea how much I’d let this get out of control. Then Pete brought up this Terminal script he wrote that would calculate the number of articles you have in your reading list, and also spit out a txt file to document your reading list plus bookmarks. I kinda hate and love him for introducing me to this, but hey, if I want to get my proverbial shit in order this year, a major reading list cull is a good place to start.

Actually, it feels great. Kinda like a digital version of going through your wardrobe to discard all the clothes you’ll never wear again. I may have been living in a bubble by having no idea about my reading list mess, but the knock on effect is that I’m now wondering where else in my life – my physical life – I can reduce my junk burden. Shame Pete can’t write me a Terminal script for that… [And don’t even try it, Pete.]

If you’re interested in running the script yourself, it’s on github. Enjoy.