A Handy Way to Organize Your Bookmarks
Do you have a mess of bookmarks in a giant list? Can you never find that one great site you saw last week? Is your morning computer time spent clicking all sorts of places to get to the sites you read every day? Solution alert!
I recently switched from using Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome. (Wanna know why or what I think of it? If anyone is interested, I’ll write a post about it. Let me know in the comments.) As part of the switch, I realized it was definitely time to get my bookmarks in shape. Amazingly, my solution has also saved me a bunch of time every day because I don’t forget which news site I’ve already read, so I don’t keep reading the same thing over and over. Yeah, I do that sometimes. I originally read this idea in an article on Slate. I can’t find the article now, but I’m pretty sure it was written by Farhad Manjoo.
I haven’t used Internet Explorer much to know if these tips work in it, but I think they’d work with just a little tweaking. This plan does work in FIrefox and Chrome. Have no idea what browser you’re using? Then, honestly, the rest of this article won’t make much sense to you. Beyond that, it’s pretty simple to implement. Five minutes after you finish reading this, you can be set up and ready to go.
Create bookmark folders for each occasion you look at websites. Put the websites in that folder. My categories are:
- Morning–A couple news sites, facebook, and my Google calendar.
- Recipes–Recipes I have never tried, but I’m actually planning to try. Be honest–bookmarking recipes you’ll never actually make is just cluttering your mind.
- Blogs–Blogs or similar sites that are updated regularly that I check roughly once a day.
- Occasional blogs–See above, but I check these a few times a week.
- Misc–Websites I need for specific purposes occasionally. My library website, banking websites, local theater sites, and such.
Make these categories fit your browsing needs. They’re easily altered, so don’t fret about it. Get started categorizing, and a week from now review how they’re working.
You can leave a few very frequently used bookmarks on the toolbar not in folders. Email websites, your own blog, and the such. Probably fewer than five sites are legitimately uncategorized.
To use these categories, you can right-click on the folder name and open all the bookmarks in a new tab. You may be asked if you really want to open 20 tabs if you have 20 bookmarks, but feel free to do so. I usually open a folder or two, then do something else for a couple minutes while they all load. My husband thinks I’m crazy when I have 30 tabs open at a time on my computer. When ready to read the sites, start at the left of the tab bar. Close each tab as you finish it, and you’ll automatically move to a new tab. Usually, there are two or three tabs I want to handle later, so I leave them open and skip to the next. Once I’m out of tabs, I’m done messing around browsing for a while.
To easily add or move bookmarks, click the little star on the right of your address bar (sorry, IE users). You can add and categorize a bookmark right there. If you decide to move or remove a bookmark, you can use the already starred symbol to do so. For example, my “Occasional blogs” list is pretty new, since my “Blogs” list was getting full and had quite a mix of regularly and irregularly updated sites. I added the folder, and for a couple days I moved blogs over to the new folder until I was happy with the mix.
To recap:
- Create folders. (2 minutes)
- Sort bookmarks into appropriate folders. (3 minutes)
- Right click and open all bookmarks to view. (You’re already done)
Do you have another way to organize bookmarks? I also follow some blogs by email. Make sure to follow this blog while you’re adding your bookmarks!
This post is linked at Works for Me Wednesday.
