Making lists from URLs

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 17, 2018 at 10:47 AM

@Luhmann

I think the issue here is whether you want to capture first and make a decision about the value (short, medium, or long-term) of the link later, or the other way round, decide the value, and then put it in the right place.

The former requires a single catch-all cross platform in-box (which what you seem to ask about), and then a subsequent action (later) to classify them. I tried this but it didn’t work for me because it just creates workload for the future and I never have enough time to go back and sort through it all. The other problem is that important or urgent links get lost among masses of less important ones.

The second option (my current practice) is that I make a decision about the value of the link immediately, and then I place it in its most appropriate location (i.e. there isn’t a single cross-platform solution for it).

If it requires immediate attention or very soon, I use the “Clip to WorkFlowy” Chrome extension (which is my very first icon right next to the URL address box in Chrome) and then paste it straight into WorkFlowy in the appropriate “category” (hierarchical level), which is a tab that’s always open (and set to open automatically upon launching Chrome on all my machines). This takes three clicks, so it’s fairly painless.

In WorkFlowy I have the following hierarchies:

For urgent stuff:

Do > Today > Work
Do > Today > Home

For less urgent stuff (where “Next” means any time in the near future):

Do > Next > Work
Do > Next > Home

This is cross-platform insofar as it works on desktop and mobile platforms that allow you to to use Chrome with extensions. I only use this on my Windows and Chrome OS systems. But it’s at least accessible on mobile platforms.

If the above is not available (i.e. I’m using an iOS device or an Android tablet), then I just email links to myself, and do the above later.

If an online article needs longer-term archiving, then I just save it as PDF directly into Google Drive into the appropriate folder. This is properly cross-platform.

And finally, if something requires integration into my very long-term knowledge base, then it gets its own ConnectedText “topic” (wiki page); but this is on a single Windows laptop, so not cross-platform.

So for me it’s all about making the decision first (how important or urgent the link is), and then it gets filed accordingly. This system has evolved through many years or trial and error solutions (the main change was that Google Drive has replaced Surfulater for me, due to it being cross-platform and also because online backup of Surfulater files takes up too much bandwidth, as it resaves the entire multiple Gigabyte database file, even if you’ve just added one link).