Fighting tsundoku

Tsundoku (n) : Japanse word for the constant act of buying books, but never reading them. Specifically, it is letting books pile up in one’s room so much that the owner never gets a chance to read all of them.

In addition to this classic definition of tsundoku, there are many forms of digital tsundoku on the web, and I'm victim to quite a few of them. Here are a few ways I collect too much digital stuff:

  • My Pocket list is full of articles from throughout the web. I've probably saved 30+ just this year.
  • I use Twitter likes as a sort of bookmarking feature, but rarely return to them.
  • There's quite a few video games that I either haven't finished or haven't started yet.
  • I have a relatively small list of bookmarked Medium articles that I have to read.
  • I have a decently sized list of YouTube videos that I have to watch.

So in an effort to stop doing this, I'm introducting the following rules:

  1. For the next 30 days I can only read/watch stuff I've already bookmarked, and not add new items to list. This includes Pocket, Twitter, Medium and YouTube.
  2. I can only buy a new video game once I'm done playing the current one.

I'm hoping that I can implement Rule 1 a few times a year and in that way stop piling up digital information I don't need. Let's see how it goes.


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