What the Fran

The Great Wishlist Purge

My hobbies include putting stuff on my wishlists and then never doing anything about it.

My Amazon wishlist is a sprawling monster and I want to be using Amazon less. It's also a cognitive load. And the original function of wishlists was that other people can see them and buy stuff? I have never used mine this way.

They aren't that useful - in order not to have a hundred lists I kept the categories broad. But that means scrolling through loads of irrelevant stuff. The categories are based on my Notion... So why not just keep them there?

I've got three main wishlists:

That is 1100 books. That'll keep me busy for a decade.

The first step was going through the list and cleaning it up. I could have done this from the spreadsheet but it felt like there was no point exporting books I wasn't interested in and seeing the cover helped me remember the book and decide.

This removed 54 books. Some were duplicates between the three lists. Did the print option and copied them into a spreadsheet.

I do have a TBR tag on my reading database but I don't want to flood it. I made a books page under each tag, and linked all these pages to a central TBR list on the reading page. It kind of makes sense, honest. It took absolutely forever. I'm sure it was worth it. I hope it was worth it.

Importantly, the Amazon wishlists are now gone! Which should cut down on the temptation to buy there.

Time will tell if I actually use these lists when looking for a book to read. It might need adjusting. Also, I already have Many purchased books waiting to be read.

In fact, for fun, let's approximate my total wishlists / to be read etc. My library lists contain 155. I can see 21 books from where I am sitting now, there must be at least that many upstairs. 26 on Internet Archive. 20 on Notion. My Kindle says 507 unread but I promise that's not true. Some of them are duplicates, some I definitely have read so I'm halving that. There are definitely other recs and ideas hanging around but never mind them, for now.

Still. 1539. Best get reading.