If you need rescuing from the clutches of your bookmarks, this article is for you.

With such great content available online, you get into the habit of saving every nice thing you come across, usually with the intention of reading or viewing it later. Somehow, you never get around to doing that because you're busy bookmarking the next interesting article or cool video or quirky website that has caught your fancy.

You often spend precious time sorting, tagging, and sharing links, many of which you're are unlikely to revisit. Decluttering those links from time to time does not stop the bookmarks from piling up again. To manage your bookmarks better, you need to stop hoarding them in the first place, and you can do that with the following methods.

Man holding object

Say No To Time-Dependent Content

Avoid saving content that is time specific. As technological advancements continue to take place, tips, tricks, and tutorials related to gadgets and software become irrelevant as time passes. The same holds good for content like news-based articles, shopping deals, etc. For this reason, it's best to access such pages on a need-to-know basis rather than bookmarking them. Whenever you want information about a particular topic, you can easily find it through a web search or a site-specific search.

countdown

The next time you're looking for info on good mobile apps, you can search MakeUseOf for something along the lines of best ios apps 2013 or best android apps 2013. This will give you articles like 10 Awesome Third-Party Apps and 5 Android Apps That Are Worth Every Penny, both of which are more relevant today.

Downsize your bookmarks further by using the same approach for items such as how-tos, list posts, and videos.

Look Beyond The Regular Bookmark Managers

The native bookmarking feature of browsers as well as apps like Pocket, Diigo, and Instapaper let you save content at the click of a button. They make it so easy to bookmark any Web page that you don't think twice before saving anything that looks remotely interesting.

To get past this trigger-happy bookmarking behavior, you need a method that is a tad more complex than clicking on the Star icon or some bookmarklet. Not too complex, mind you, but just enough to give you pause for thought. The following apps that double up as bookmark managers can help you with that.

Twitter

You already use the Favorites feature of Twitter to save tweets that you like. Now take it one step further. If you stumble upon something that you think deserves a second look, tweet about it and then save that tweet as a favorite. Think of it this way. If something isn't worth tweeting about, it may not be worth saving. You can also try this with other platforms like App.net.

Email

Create an email draft titled Bookmarks. Whenever you want to save a link, edit the draft, copy-paste the link to it, and save the draft. Use headers to divide the links into categories.

email-draft

Dropbox

Create a Dropbox folder for bookmarks, and each time you want to save a Web page, drag the tiny icon that's available to the left of the page's URL in the address bar to this folder. Doing so will create an Internet Shortcut to that page.

Bit.ly

If you use a url shortener like Bit.ly, you can use it to save content as well. Simply shorten any link that you want to bookmark and it gets saved automatically. Both the original and shortened links stay in one place for easy access. You can even set the link status to Public or Private.

bitly

Use Two Apps Instead Of One

The content you save can be classified into two types: the kind that you keep returning to because it is evergreen and the kind that you read once, say, over the weekend, to stay up-to-date on the latest from around the world.

It's a good idea to separate both by using different methods. For example, you can use the email draft method to save fairly time-independent articles like How To Be More Productive When Working From Home. To save content for weekly reading, choose a different option, such as Pocket. Then once a week or so, clear out the links from your Pocket account to make way for fresh content in the upcoming week.

The Conclusion

The simple tricks listed here keep your bookmarks manageable by ensuring that you save only that content which you're likely to revisit. Avoiding the pile-up of stored content is so much better than having to declutter endless amounts of it later.

What tricks do you use to deal with bookmarks?

Image Credits: Featured image is a derivative of Bookmarks by nick.amoscato (used under CC), Man holding object by Saad Faruque (used under CC), 5-4-3-2-1 Neon Countdown at Night via stevendepolo (used under CC)