I've come to realize that the ratio of media that I own (music, movies, TV shows, books, games) and media that I have actually finished / enjoyed is totally skewed towards the former. A lot of times I'll enjoy something once, then forget about it completely. Games especially are like this for me.

So anons, how do you ensure that you read / play / listen to everything in your collection, or at least avoid hoarding things without actually enoying them? Is the solution to go minimal or do you have methods of varying what you watch / play / listen to?

This can be a general thread about "collection anxiety" as well if that works.

I'm very picky as to what even add to my backlog to begin with. As a full time working adult I don't have that much time to spend anyway so I carefully choose what to spend it on (most of the time, lol). And I also have these irregular phases where I either play lots of vidya or read manga or binge watch a show so if I'm not feeling like reading I won't force myself. But yeah, sooner or later I'll be in the mood to try something new or just really bored and that's when I look at my backlog and pick something I feel like reading/playing/watching.

I defintely have problems with hoarding digital and physical both alike. I need to definitely figure out a good way to start going through my backlog without being overwhelmed. I definitely have enough content through media and games to last for the rest of my lifetime and then some.

I also have a problem with spending way too much time browsing the internet so thus avoiding a bunch of my backlog constantly.

A lot of times I'll enjoy something once, then forget about it completely.

I know this feeling. Once I realized I had this feeling (at least for anime), I will always look for wallpapers of the anime I just finished. I do this so that when my computer boots up, I get reminded that I watched that and I get a happy reminder of their story. There's a lot of anime that I would have forgotten by now, but because I see their wallpaper every once in a while, I can remember at least the main story of each anime.

I only have a digital collection, and I've paid for very little of it, so I don't ever feel beholden to actually experience any of the media I download. If I download something thinking I'll enjoy it but never actually get around to it, it eventually just gets deleted to make space for something that I will enjoy.

I think feeling obligated to consume everything you have is more of an issue than collecting in the first place, it may have more something to do with impulse buying or the like if it's become a problem.

Typically, I won't download something if I am not going to immediately start experiencing it. If I want to watch a anime, for example, I download a series the moment I want to start watching it. I don't download it just to add to a backlog of stuff.

There's been countless times where I never finished a series or never listened to an album either. If I've stopped watching a series halfway through and it's been months since I've had any desire to watch an episode of it, that's a pretty good indicator that I wasn't enjoying it enough for be worth the time to finish. I feel no guilt about dropping it.

>>5

Typically, I won't download something if I am not going to immediately start experiencing it.

That's the mindset that I need to seriously start having. I have about 4TB of digital backlog let alone how much physical backlog I have with games and random VHS/DVDs I've picked up over the last decade.

>>6

That's the best solution I think. Something else I run into though is when I download something more as an act of archival - like if I see an interesting PDF on lainchan or a cool ROM. But inevitably I still feel bad about not watching / reading it. Maybe I need to better segment the archival and "active" sections on my storage server.

The death of a certain very large music tracker a few years ago kicked me into full hoarding mode. I realize I may never read/play/listen to some of what I download, and that's fine.

Typically, I won't download something if I am not going to immediately start experiencing it.

This too is fine.

What is important is that you don't spend alot of time/worry fussing about and just enjoy your collection. Admittedly I have some worry about it getting lost, but ultimately one has to realize that such concerns are fleeting.

>>8

don't spend alot of time/worry fussing about and just enjoy your collection.

It seems weird to me that the issue that a few of the posters in this thread have is feeling like they must go through their backlog, and must consume everything they have. It also sounds like their backlog /is/ what they have, and not necessarily what they actually want to enjoy.

I can't pretend to understand how other people think, but I would guess that some people misinterpret how they experience 'collection anxiety'. I think there was a thread about this recently on a music tracker about this, where people were talking about how they had a hard time deciding what to watch or listen to, because of the size of their collection. That sounds different from what is described in this thread.

>>7
Yeah, that's another way to look at things. If it's archival separate the organized files like so.

>>1

For small digital media (e.g., music), I don't really worry about it, since storage space is pretty cheap.

For larger digital media (e.g., movies/tv shows that I download in HD), I don't usually download until I actually am about to watch. For movies, I keep a list on letterboxd of stuff I want to watch. It's pretty big, so sometimes I use an RNG to randomly select something off the list.

For physical objects, my book collection is taking over my apartment. I've tried to make a rule that I have to read a certain number of books before getting new ones, and I periodically sell some of the books that I already read. Still, it's really hard to keep from getting more used books!

I think this has a lot to do with overchoice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
especially when it's free and digital, and you don't have to consume everything because of sunk cost.
I think >>11's RNG is the way to go to start attacking it.

I've left discovering new music to chance. I have 1TB of unread manga and I've found that it's fine to judge by the covers, but it's fantastic to be blindsided by a fantastic series.

I just started making a structured habit out of consuming media. I watch a movie every day and only download more when I have run out. I have a textfile where I put in movies I read about to download when the time comes and also use my imdb recommendations.
For music I do it similarly but have come to solely rely on my last.fm album recommendations and a few bandcamps I follow. Listening to music isn't as consistent as movie watching for me because I need to do something else simultaneously. Usually that's browsing the internet, some video games classify as well. So when I have better/more important things to do I won't make any progress on my music. Unlike films I only download new music on sundays so if I run out of albums in the mid of the week I simply put my whole library on shuffle.
Books I read every morning right after getting up and then also later in the day. I am a pretty slow reader so I don't need any kind of algorithm to constantly feed new things. Osmosis is enough. For new books I want to read I I have a bookmark folder in my browser. This category is the only one that has the potential to overflow but I have gotten pickier as the time investment is so much bigger than for film and music.

Does anyone have this problem where you watch a movie, read a book or listen to some artist, then look it up on Wikipedia or TV Tropes or some other site, discover some similar media, and then the same thing happens to that newly-discovered media?

>>16
What? Just go on a downloading spree and not actually consuming it?

>>17
No, I don't download it, I just add it to my endless lists of things that I want to consume later

So anons, how do you ensure that you read / play / listen to everything in your collection

In the case of music, I have a folder for recently downloaded, and everything in there needs to be fully listened to before it goes into my main folder and can be loaded up and indexed by my music player.
As for shows, I don't have any system but I download infrequently and when I do, it's to actually watch it, so that's not a problem.

I just play/read/watch whenever I feel like it. For example: Sometimes I get my manga phase where I can binge 100 chapters in half a day and then there's month were I don't read a single one (aside from the ongoing ones).
So I trust that sooner or later there will come a phase where I will play game X or watch show Y on my backlog. I'm still fairly young so it's probably better to have big backlog anyway. When I'm retired there's plenty time to work on that.