Digital Over-Packaging

We’ve all been victims of over-packaging. You order a gadget and it comes in a box ten times its size, or you have to fish a small book out of a sea of packing peanuts. It’s wasteful, time-consuming, and frustratingly unnecessary. But over-packing goes beyond physical products too. You may not have recognized it, but browser bookmarks are all about surrounding too little with too much.

In fact, bookmarks were over-packing long before Amazon.com even shipped their first oversized box.

One Size Over-Fits All

Bookmarks are extremely useful. If you need a shortcut to a particular web dashboard or if you want to put aside a news article for later they can take care of it. The problem is that we don’t always need everything on the bookmarked page. Maybe you save a link to a restaurant’s website because you don’t want to write down the phone number and address somewhere else, but the rest of the information on that page (images, menu links, reservation forms) is superfluous.

This is most common with lists. When we find a helpful list online we usually don’t need everything on it. For example, a list of good books might only have a couple titles that interest us. If we wish to retain this information with a bookmark we need to save the entire list. So if there are only two books on a list of ten that are appealing, you need to save all ten and not just the two you like. This means that when you need to recall those two books in the future you have to sift through the useless recommendations and whatever else might be on that page. It takes all the time you save from bookmarking and spends it on searching through the information you’ve already gone through. This is especially bad if you forget what it was that you liked about the list. We’ve all had those moments of looking through our bookmarks and wondering why on earth we saved something that we did.

Take Only What You Need

The solution to this problem is twofold. First, you need to recognize how much time this is actually costing you. Bookmarking feels good because we’re passing on the extra work of remembering to the browser we’re using. Reducing cognitive load is liberating. What must be understood is that the story doesn’t end there. Bookmarking is step one, but using that bookmark is step two. If you’re finding it difficult to recall the reasoning behind some of your bookmarks you may be falling into this trap. Additionally, if you save a lot of lists (or pages with only a small subset of information you care about) you’re probably at risk as well.

Second, once you’ve identified you’re using bookmarks in this way it’s time to seek out a solution. If you value your time, doing this will be very helpful.

So what can you do? Here are some easy tips to follow.

Start being more specific with your bookmarks. If you can add tags or notes that helps. If not, change the title of the bookmark to something that reminds you of why you saved it.

Get more granular. If you find a list of books to read save the Amazon.com web pages of the books you liked instead. If you go this route it’s advisable that you create categorized folders for these bookmarks for easy searching.

Ditch the browser. Create a word document or spreadsheet file to copy and paste the list items, information, and descriptions that are most relevant to you. A to-do list application (or pen and paper) can also do this as well (but may be more time intensive). Spreadsheets are great for this if you find yourself saving information that covers multiple categories.

Lastly, you can email the page to yourself and include a note in the subject line or body of the message that explains what’s important to you on the page. This can be especially useful if your email provider allows you make search queries across your saved and archived emails (like Gmail) for faster information recall.

You may find other systems that work for you so embrace your creativity. Bookmarks will always be useful, but you’ll find that for the things that we often save, there’s a better, faster, and more ‘eco-friendly’ way of avoiding digital over-packaging.