How I manage my bookmarks productively

Over the years I have found myself bookmarking a lot of websites as I travel around the internet. After a point, carelessly bookmarking websites only increases the clutter, and makes you less productive if you're trying to find something you've saved.

Here is what I came up with to solve this problem for myself. My bookmarks folder only has a bunch of folders and every website I save goes into one of these folders.

Initially my bookmarks were a messy bunch of all sorts of websites and YouTube video and what not. After realising that I need to clean up everything, I made a couple of folders as a baseline that I thought would be able to accomodate all the bookmarks that I had up until that point.

Webdev resources, Side project ideas, Productivity, Music, Read again, Inspiration and Cool tools

I sorted all my existing bookmarks into one of these folders, and if I felt like a bookmark didn't belong to any of these, then I made a new folder based on what the specific bookmark was about. I ended up with a few more folders, like Vim, Ruby on Rails, Books etc.

Now for every website that I want to save, I have a mental framework for how I will be using it in the future. Found a developer's protfolio that I found really cool? Let me save it in Inspiration so that I will find it again when I'm casually going through the folder when I'm feeling a creative block. What about this clever blog that I read? I'll save it in Read again so that I can read it again sometime, or want to share it with someone later on (I also save interesting videos that I technically want to "watch again" in here). Then there is Music where I have a bunch of YouTube playlists and stuff.

I would highly recommend you clean up your bookmarks folder in a similar manner and categorize everything based on some criteria that makes it easier for you to go back to them. It might take you an afternoon, but trust me its worth it. Who knows, you might even even find some old hidden gem of a bookmark that you had forgotten about while cleaning up everything :)