Magazine Collection Rules

I’ve recently had to get rid of a bundle of magazine back issues, some of them from as far back as November 1999 (sysadmin mag, an article on Expect that I’ve still not read…) and I’ve decided to put a couple of rules in place to help keep things sane:

  1. Any magazine over three months old goes.
  2. No more than 20 magazines in the pile at any time.

The first rule serves two purposes, it stops me saying “I’ll read that on the weekend” month after month, and it helps keep my information up to date. We’re in an industry that never slows (we’ll ignore the irony of me having so many dead tree publications) and while working through my backlog I found whole issues that were now completely redundant to me. In-depth articles on IPChains, Kernel 2.2 and similar don’t really deserve the shelf space anymore.

The second rule will hopefully stop me buying too many magazines that I never get much out of. I read, well buy, 8-10 technical magazines a month. And a lot of them ain’t much use anymore (Cough Linux Journal Cough). By making myself conscious of how many I’ve got at home hopefully I’ll start dropping this number. Which’ll save me money, shelf space and from getting annoyed at the quality of the articles. It’s not anal, it’s proactive!