I generally have lots of tabs open (to the point of being made fun of) and my tendency is to open and close them swiftly in the course of multi-pronged subject exploration, with a small handful of “best of exploration” that I retain so that they prime me in subsequent hours or days or weeks with reminders, re-reading opportunities, and the possibility of being folded into longer term projects. Every so often I clean them up by transcribing URLs and notes into text files that accumulate in an idea-archive. I endorse some of this behavior, but suspect that it could become problematic in the long term… not because of “akrasia”, but as part of a more specific problem called “hoarding”.
Hoarding appears to be a mental disorder that can start in one’s teens, but really starts to become visible in one’s 30′s or 40′s, growing with time until you’re an 80-year-old living in a pile of useless trash. My current working model for it is that retention behavior is the default behavior, mostly driven by positive emotions triggered by objects. To throw something away, a hoarder needs to consciously override this default using fluid intelligence (calculating that expected use-value in realistic plans are less than inventory costs?). As aging progresses, fluid mental abilities decline, and you’re less able to decide that something isn’t worth keeping, until there are tiny trails between the bed, the toilette, and the microwave and the rest of the house is full of piles of boxes full of sorted boxes of crap.
Amusingly, I found out about hoarding via my tab-heavy information searches and left the tabs open for days, and cleaned them up into a TODO file to have a conversation with family about hoarding, which is part of why I’m aware of this. Within five years I plan to do some debugging of space management habits and policies to make sure they’re solid and clean, but I expect it to take 30 minutes per day of thinking, acting, measuring, and updating for around six months and it isn’t that high a priority relative to other things currently on my plate.
I find that regular house moves drastically improves hoarding behaviour. Especially international moves :)
It doesn’t stop you hoarding—but gives you good opportunity to prune/discard.
I generally have lots of tabs open (to the point of being made fun of) and my tendency is to open and close them swiftly in the course of multi-pronged subject exploration, with a small handful of “best of exploration” that I retain so that they prime me in subsequent hours or days or weeks with reminders, re-reading opportunities, and the possibility of being folded into longer term projects. Every so often I clean them up by transcribing URLs and notes into text files that accumulate in an idea-archive. I endorse some of this behavior, but suspect that it could become problematic in the long term… not because of “akrasia”, but as part of a more specific problem called “hoarding”.
Hoarding appears to be a mental disorder that can start in one’s teens, but really starts to become visible in one’s 30′s or 40′s, growing with time until you’re an 80-year-old living in a pile of useless trash. My current working model for it is that retention behavior is the default behavior, mostly driven by positive emotions triggered by objects. To throw something away, a hoarder needs to consciously override this default using fluid intelligence (calculating that expected use-value in realistic plans are less than inventory costs?). As aging progresses, fluid mental abilities decline, and you’re less able to decide that something isn’t worth keeping, until there are tiny trails between the bed, the toilette, and the microwave and the rest of the house is full of piles of boxes full of sorted boxes of crap.
Amusingly, I found out about hoarding via my tab-heavy information searches and left the tabs open for days, and cleaned them up into a TODO file to have a conversation with family about hoarding, which is part of why I’m aware of this. Within five years I plan to do some debugging of space management habits and policies to make sure they’re solid and clean, but I expect it to take 30 minutes per day of thinking, acting, measuring, and updating for around six months and it isn’t that high a priority relative to other things currently on my plate.
I find that regular house moves drastically improves hoarding behaviour. Especially international moves :) It doesn’t stop you hoarding—but gives you good opportunity to prune/discard.