Meet Hazel

How many URLs do you receive from friends, family, and co-workers over the course a given day, week, or month? If you're anything like me, every single day there are at least a few email messages advising "check this out!" with a website for me to visit. Sometimes they're for work, sometimes a cute Dachshund picture, and others are recommended by friends for no apparent reason at all.

And then there's Twitter. Someone far more clever than I am could probably calculate this, but I bet that a large percentage of messages posted to that service include a URL to click.

Not that I'm complaining, but there's only so much time in the day, so my method for dealing with the flood is to immediately decide if the link sounds like something I'll be interested in. This is based on a subjective, mood-driven assessment that includes who sent it, if the URL is clearly forwarded from a friend-of-a-friend, the host site (if I recognize it), and the apparent media involved. (If it's clearly a Flash-based interactive thing, into the Trash it goes.) If, after all that, there's still any interest I'll click the link and make a snap judgement about what I see. (A common practice, see Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye.)

If the result looks worthwhile, I'll drag the URL from Safari's Location field to a folder named "URLs" that resides on my Desktop. Then, when I have more time, I open my URLs folder and revisit the sites by double-clicking the webloc files.

At least, that's what I intend to do. But you know what they say about good intentions. A few weeks ago I noticed, to my surprise, that my folder contained nearly 150 items. Worse yet, a few of them were from 2006. Yes, that's right, almost two years and I still hadn't gone back to read that hilarious blog post about frozen pizza that my best friend sent me. Oops.

Clearly, I needed a new strategy. My first order of business was to declare the equivalent of email bunkruptcy and delete all of the webloc files that I had accumulated. A clean slate, so my new approach wasn't bogged down by the detritus of old, bad habits.

Recognizing that I'm unlikely to find more free time to view incoming sites, and genuinely appreciating the URLs that friends send me, I decided that I needed make one more friend. Her name is Hazel.

She's the product of Noodlesoft. I love her because I didn't have to change any of my old habits, I still judge and file sites like I did before, but now Hazel cleans up behind me. Hazel is a utility that, thanks to the power of Spotlight, offers very powerful and flexible automation for acting upon your files. Now, if I haven't opened a webloc file for more than 2 weeks, Hazel throws it in to the Trash. No guilt, no remorse, no cognitive overhead.

Here's how I have Hazel configured. If a webloc file in the target folder hasn't been "opened" for 2 weeks, it's moved to the Trash.

Simple, right? I have to admit that I started going down a more complicated path. Instead of moving the files to the Trash immediately, I set up a series of rules that changed their label color based on their age. My reasoning was that I would see the ones that were most at risk of being lost and focus on visiting those. (I was inspired to do this by Tinderbox, which slowly yellows notes as they age.) But after several minutes, or longer, of tinkering to get just the right label colors I realized that this was overkill and I forced myself to settle for the rule pictured above.

And so far, it has worked wonderfully. So keep those cool links coming folks, Hazel's got my back.