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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

How about having too many tabs that you never get around to closing?

Articles on Instapaper and the like that you never get around to reading?

Side projects that you never finish?

I've been wanting to make a todo list that is sensitive to this. It's called Promises, and, when you add a todo item, you make a "promise" to resolve it. Every day the promise is active, it gets a bit more grey, and after a month it eventually fades away and gets added to a section of the app called "the hell of broken promises", where it can never be removed from again. If you do resolve it, it gets fulfilled and goes away with a nice animation.

Hopefully, this will force you to consider what you actually intend to finish versus what you're just adding for the feel-good factor of "oh yeah, I'm definitely going to do this at SOME point, years later". I don't know whether that's good or not, but it'll be a fun project, and I think we'd all be better off if we could say "you know, if I haven't read that news article in the two months since I've added it, it's probably not important enough to keep around".

I think this would be a truly powerful tool if the promises were only able to be removed/declared complete by someone else, who would partner with you as a kind of integrity escrow agent. You keep my future self honest to my present self, I do the same for you. Then generalize to groups with a big graph of stake holder crosslinks if you want to get enterprise-ey with it.

I've found that this is kind of a brain-hack. Adding the article to Instapaper or opening the tab itself satisfies my FOMO even if I don't actually read it or only glance at it later before closing or marking as read. I do a similar thing for side-projects - I have a Google Doc where I keep a list of side projects. When a new one comes up or when I find myself fixated on ideas for an existing one I just write the ideas down in the doc, likely to never be read again. Writing them down seems to get them out of my head.

> How about having too many tabs that you never get around to closing?

Sounds like me, and inevitably when I feel the need to declutter, I go through them and add them to my bookmark folders - never to be opened again.. but maybe one day

Or my browser will crash on me, and the "restore previous session" will be broken/lost and so will the cache of the previous previous session and the information will be lost forever - although that's payback for keeping up all those tabs for weeks on end (maybe longer)

I would definitely add Steam games that are never played.

I went into Steam and just decided to hide a bunch of those games. Most of them I got through Humble Bundle. A lot of chaff.

Or just games in general (glancing at my collection of >1000 titles).

I had like +2000 tabs saved in my OneTab now, plus hundred of tab groups in Session Tab (not on my PC, so not sure about correct name) plus +200 tabs saved in Pinboard. I tend to collect things and made myself actually have to look over at least once to see if it worth saving...

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