bitful

Over the last six months a reminder has been going off every Saturday to prompt me to go over my del.icio.us account and rename similar tags to avoid duplication.

Another reminder has been prompting me every month to delete tags that I only used once, and therefore considered to be too detailed and of little use.

I do use del.icio.us extensively to keep my bookmarks organised and synced across machines with the del.icio.us Firefox extension. It is therefore natural that I like my tags to be organised.

This is however taking away precious minutes from my life every week, and when my life flashes in front of me on my death bed I don't want it to be dotted by Saturday mornings spent renaming all the instances of 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogs' to 'weblogs', just so that my world could be a tidier place.

I have therefore deleted the recurrent Outlook task and related reminders. What I thought was tag decluttering ended up cluttering my life with unnecessary obligations, and that is plain ghastly.

I trust the technology to become more and more intelligent and one day, hopefully soon, to be able perform these tasks for me. In the meantime, I accept to live in a little bit of a disorganised sea of data. It is not the end of the world. I can already set del.icio.us up to only show tags that have been used a minimum of 3 or 5 times anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 10:20 pm and last modified on February 20th, 2008 at 9:24 pm, and is filed under declutter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.