Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?
Well... in terms of todos... Or they are done or they are simply procrastinating, there is nothing that can help if they are real TODOs, otherwise are just wishlists that normally grow and that&#x27;s nothing wrong with such growth, instead they might hold informational value for your ancestors if they recover some useful ideas in a more or less far future.<p>In IT terms you simply feel IMVHO the lack of desktop operating environments, like classic Xerox or LispM, witch means systems designed to be user-centric instead of service-centric a small example:<p>- if ALL banks&#x2F;financial institutions just publish a public OFX feed you can subscribe with your own desktop tools, with legal value since any entry is digitally signed by the bank AND any dispositive operation is also signed by you (before) and the bank (after) you&#x27;ll have MUCH LESS work to do to handle your finance: anything will appear in the same place, with the same UI you like, with a common auth mean etc AND also banks have much less crap to produce, maintain and hosts for their porcals (portals are another thing);<p>- IF we have a unified payment method for taxes, federated of course, we have far less overhead in paying pretty anything but divide et impera means profit for those who offer a specific payment service, a specific UI&#x2F;service etc;<p>- IF we only have FLOSS classic desktops for the modern world we will have our own end-user automation and ANYTHING will be simpler;<p>IF, if, if, if. The point is simple: tech is a tool, can be developed for a purpose and being more or less effective for such purpose. Actual tech have a purpose mostly AGAINST users for profits of a little cohort, so we feel frustration and issues. That&#x27;s not a tech issue, that&#x27;s a social issue and correcting it demand decades of (missed&#x2F;lost) development and social push in that direction witch means awareness.<p>Personally I have <i>almost</i>-zero inbox thanks to Emacs (notmuch, fetchmail, maildrop under EXWM) witch makes some things quickly: noting things in org-mode via org-roam to access quickly &quot;my personal semantic Google search&quot; with org-attached files and easy elisp automation just to generate the right text in the right place I cut many time doing many things because almost anything run far quicker and friction-less, anything is at my fingertips. Unfortunately being a not-so-developed territory that&#x27;s work after a certain time investment AND until something changes radically. For instance in the recent past I&#x27;ve invested few hours in few days to automatically:<p>- see certain mails in my inbox, the ones from my main voice&#x2F;data carrier;<p>- extract the attached pdf bill (maildrop pipes to uudeview)<p>- rename the attached files (pdfgrep-ing the invoice numbers and due date)<p>- add an entry in my relevant note (a note per contract with subheadings per any bill, with invoice number, date, amount, status etc<p>- alert me via org-agenda if after few days post the due date from my ledger the relevant entry is not appeared<p>than a day my main carrier decide to send just empty mails asking for logging-in in it&#x27;s porcal to manually download the bill. Sure they want some proof I&#x27;ve received the message, perhaps a clickable dedicated links suffice for them in tech terms and legally have the same ZERO value (in my country, a log entry from someone who say I&#x27;m logged in have no value since there is no neutral third party that certify some fact) but as a result I&#x27;ve wasted my time automating. Than I tried woob to automate the web part, it works, unfortunately they like to change their porcal often witch means breaks my automation.<p>That&#x27;s the point: our IT development is NOT DONE for us humans citizens and as a result we can do something to compensate but we can&#x27;t solve the issue alone. We need to unite and IMPOSE a human-centered IT and society, something that have happen in the past, but it&#x27;s very unlikely now.<p>Now probably we can just try to be part of a small élite that it&#x27;s united and do things for themselves. For instance ALL banks quality is evolved from bad to worse, but private banks, at least some, at least if you are good enough for them, still works enough, they are a liability since they are few and far bigger than their typical customers but they still function while the rest do not.<p>My suggestion is simple: in IT terms try to rediscover tools from the past, they have age issues, but they are far more modern and advanced than modern one, just look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;B6jfrrwR10k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;B6jfrrwR10k</a> for a quick showcase than decide if invest the needed amount of time to learn and implement your own desktop environment to help YOU not some third party data-and-money-munging service...