In my browser (I use Edge, don’t @ me) in the bookmarks bar, I have five folders, left to right: Weather, Tshoot, Money, Funtimes, and Other favorites, pinned to the far right.
Weather is rarely used; it’s not only got weather sites, but sites for reporting the Air Quality Index and smoke from fire, since Portland and the Pacific Northwest now has a Fire Season.
Tshoot has links to my network router/cable modem, my Synology, and a bunch of bookmarks for collecting network information and troubleshooting Windows and Mac computers. I use this more often than the ones in Weather but not as often as the rest.
Money has multiple sub-folders but they’re all related to my budget, my bank and credit cards, utilities and bills, memberships and subscriptions, healthcare costs, paycheck calculators, you name it. The top bookmark here is to my budget spreadsheet.
I use this folder a lot, and I mean a lot. I’m opening something from here multiple times per day if I’m sitting at my computer. It might be unhealthy, how often I’m using something from here. I’m using it more now that I have a job and income, to help plan out paying down my debts, than I did when I was unemployed and had no income in-coming.
You can kinda sense a theme in these three, right? They’re informational or related to responsiblities and duties I have. There’s very little joyful about figuring out if the weather is going to kill me or not, or finding out why my Xfinity connection has dropped again.
Next one up is Funtimes, and it’s where I put links for entertainment sites, time-killers, social media, as well as sub-folders for running my online D&D game, or other gaming-related sites: wikis for games I play, that kind of thing. You would think that this folder is full of nothing but joyful things, right? It’s there in the name: Fun Times ahead, all ye who click here.
You might think that; you’d be wrong. In fact, the observation that kicked off this whole post was when I opened that folder this morning. I saw that the top folder in there, the first thing my mouse cursor hovers over when scrolling through the links, is “Site Management”. That’s where I put links to login to this blog, the hosting site, the Analytics page, domain renewal, DNS, that kind of thing.
I’m the one who put it there but I couldn’t tell you what that has to do with fun times. I do enjoy writing but I admin my blog as basic maintenance and upkeep. I like having a well-maintained blog but it’s not joyful, y’know? Seeing that today, realizing what it means, I moved that folder over to Tshoot, where it fits better.
Below that folder is Creative, and it’s full of folders. The top one in Creative is Writing Tools. In here lives a link to my favorite online text editor, Writer from Big Huge Labs, which is where I draft all my posts. This is joyful. If I’m writing in here (as I am now) I’m freely putting down words to express an idea, and that is joyful.
The rest of the folders in Creative are for drawing and art programs/pages like Inkarnate, which is joyful for me to use. Also a folder for Generative AI links (yes, I use these, but sparingly, as I’ve explained). Still looking for more ways to add joy to my days.