Some have asked how I use Unmark, our to-do application for bookmarks. We only just recently redesigned, rebuilt, and released Unmark so I waited a few weeks to write this post until my habits formed more clearly.
Every link I see goes into Unmark
On average I will see between 2 and 50 links per day. I’ll see some in our team’s Slack channels or from those I follow on Twitter or App.net or even from an email. Whatever their source, I see a bunch of links throughout the day and I usually do not look at them immediately. Instead, I put them in Unmark and label them (read, watch, listen) and tag them (#work, #space, #kayaking, #interesting) accordingly.
Some people keep 50 or 100 tabs opened in their browser at all times. I do not. I average between 5 and 10 tabs at most. (Currently: Pinned in Chrome: Unmark, Trello. This post in Barley CMS. And a munin graph showing Unmark’s growth.)
So Unmark is my storage bin for every single link that comes across my desk.
Archive liberally
I don’t know about you, but when I add something like “buy coffee beans” or “take out the garbage” to my to-do list, that task won’t sit on that list for very long. I either complete the task or ditch it. This is more true for things I add to my list but that I have no intention of doing, like, “write a letter to Aunt Agnes”. Eventually I go through and clear those tasks out.
I do the same for bookmarks that ended up in Unmark. If something is in my Unmark account for more than a few days and I don’t get to it, I’ll usually archive it. I do not hoard thousands of links that I will simply never doing anything with.
Catch up on iPhone or iPad
Though I see many interesting things throughout the day I don’t have time to read them all or to watch all of the videos or even buy the stuff I want. So I usually do take time to catch up when I’m at home from my iPad. In reality, I use Unmark on my iPad more than I do on my computer.
Every now and then I’ll get a little backed up. Just last night I archived 295 bookmarks when I was in bed. I had so many because I had imported a bunch of old links from Pinboard a few days ago. But I’m finding that, on average, I archive about 12 links per day.
Why I save so many bookmarks
I have 6 team members that I save links for. Sometimes I’ll find a JavaScript nugget that I want to chat with Tim about, or a security issue that I may discuss with Jeff, or a cool idea for our company that I’ll chat about with Kyle. So I keep a bunch of stuff to discuss with my team members.
I like to blog. I write here on my blog, I write on The Watercolor Gallery from-time-to-time, on Spacebits, on our company blog Plain Text, and I’m collecting tidbits about kayaking for my upcoming adventures. I collect a lot of information. Unmark helps me process all of that information and, when I’m done with it, archive it. We weren’t kidding when we dubbed Unmark “the to-do application for bookmarks”. That is exactly how I use it.
There are so many bookmarking solutions out there. And I think that is a good thing because every single person uses these services so differently. I’m really glad that we could bring one to the market that is so different than the others. And now thousands of people, like me, are using it every day.