Tackling the magazine problem

Is your house like mine, with a few magazines scattered here and there, some in tidy magazine boxes on shelves, and many in a box or two somewhere in the basement?

The reality is that we are probably never going to read them again, but no one can bear to throw them out.

Occasionally I get a burst of energy and start sifting through them, only to fall into the black hole of all magazine-weeding-expeditions: they are interesting, and after ten minutes of sifting, you find yourself reading an article from an issue dated April, 1992, and your work has come to a standstill.

Here’s a simple way of minimizing the magazine mess in your life:

• Go quickly through all of them to weed out the ones you can toss without any thought whatsoever. Ancient issues of news weeklies probably fall into this category.
• Now set aside all the ones you are certain you absolutely must keep forever (I love the stories in Invention & Technology and would never toss one).
• Go through all the rest and carefully rip out all of the pages you want. Staple the sets of pages together and note the issue that they came from—usually one page has an ad on the back, so you can write on that.

Now you have a large pile of trash, a small pile of keep-forever magazines, and a file full of interesting stories.

This is much easier than the traditional “keep or toss” method because you don’t have to stop and read dozens of articles (losing time) to decide if you want to keep a magazine for a single article. Just flip through it quickly, possibly only looking at the table of contents, and rip out the stories you really want.

You can stop right here if you want, and this is what my wife did for some years, but I prefer to go the extra mile and scan the saved stories into PDF documents and then run them through OCR software.

At some future date if I am looking around for some old article I vaguely recall about “planting false memories,” I can search for that phrase on my system and find a scanned PDF of an article entitled “Creating False Memories” from Scientific American, September 1997.

Of course, it goes without saying that once the article is in PDF, the scraps go to the recycle bin.