Master craftspeople kept journals. Leonardo filled notebooks. Designers maintained mood boards. These were private collections—what caught their eye, what stuck, what revealed their evolving taste.
Today, everyone has a mood board. Instagram. Pinterest. Figma. But most people never review theirs.
I used to be clueless about what I liked. Then I realized I had 1,132 reels saved on Instagram. I reviewed and sorted them all one by one (it took me three days, then I had a bot count them). The pattern said more about me than any personality test.
The original bookmark session: my job search
Last year of business school. Forty job postings saved from LinkedIn and Welcome to the Jungle. Design. Project management. Startups. Innovation. No coherent pattern—or so I thought.
Then I opened them all at once. Patterns emerged instantly: design-adjacent roles, product work, building over advising. I hadn't consciously known that. The bookmarks showed me before I could articulate it.
That moment taught me something most career advisors miss: you learn more about yourself from what you save than from what you're told to want.
This is the Bookmark Method: strategic saving over time, then batch review to extract patterns. It works for job hunting. It works for cocktails (50 saved reels, one hour of review, it confirmed I loved boozy cocktails, especially with whisky, not just "cocktails"). It works for interview questions (18 months of saved hiring content revealed I care about values alignment more than skills assessment).
Here's how it works.
The method
Step 1: Choose a domain where you feel uncertain
Not "everything." One area where you genuinely don't know your preferences. Job types. Gift ideas. Travel style. Home aesthetic. Cocktail preferences.
Step 2: Create a specific organized folder / playlist (depending on the tool)
The key insight: bookmarks with organized lists are 10x more powerful than a single pile. Instagram lets you create collections. Pinterest has boards. If your platform doesn't support this, use a note or spreadsheet.
Name it specifically: "Jobs that spark something" / "Cocktails to try" / "Interiors I like."
Step 3: Save anything that resonates, without knowing why
Don't analyze. Don't filter. If something sparks interest, save it. The resonance happens before you can articulate it. Trust that. The point is to capture the signal before your rational mind explains it away.
Step 4: Accumulate for weeks or months
This is not a weekend project. The power comes from accumulation over time. You need enough data points for patterns to emerge. Three months minimum. A year is better.
Step 5: Batch review in a protected session
Block time. One focused hour worked for me during my job search. You don't have to spend three days like I did on my reels if you're more strategic about your review. Open everything at once. David Hume described taste as "improved by practice, perfected by comparison"[1]: the deliberate act of placing items side by side until patterns emerge. Look for patterns across the whole set:
- What keeps appearing?
- What's the common thread you didn't notice while saving?
- What surprised you?
- What is not as good as the rest, in retrospect?
The pattern across 50 saved items tells you what your taste is, not what you think you should want.
There's a deeper limitation. Bourdieu argues that what we call taste is largely shaped by our social environment[2]. Your habitus is what you've absorbed through immersion. The Bookmark Method discovers your taste, which is only as good as your sources. If you accumulate from algorithmically optimized feeds, you develop taste calibrated to engagement, not quality. Curate your sources before you curate your saves.
Taste profiles
The method works for any taste. Because there's a deeper question: taste for what?
My job search had no external standard. I wasn't developing "good" preferences; I was discovering mine. But aesthetic taste has competing schools. Minimalist Japanese? French luxury? Brooklyn indie? The Bookmark Method reveals patterns within a chosen world, but can't tell you which world to choose.
Sociology maps different kinds of taste, each with its own logic:
| Profile | Focus | Breadth | Example domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Highbrow | Legitimate culture | Narrow | Classical music, fine art, modernist architecture |
| Omnivore | High + select popular | Broad | Brahms and Busta Rhymes, arthouse and blockbusters |
| Subcultural | Underground authenticity | Medium | Indie music, niche scenes, anti-mainstream |
| Middlebrow | Respectable mainstream | Medium | Quality TV, heritage literature, classic rock |
| Plural actor | Mixed across domains | Mixed | Highbrow in one area, mainstream in another |
The highbrow snob (Bourdieu)[3] values legitimate culture: classical music, fine arts, serious literature. Status comes from exclusivity and distance from the masses.
The omnivore (Peterson)[4] has replaced the snob as the new elite profile. Status comes from breadth: appreciating Brahms and Busta Rhymes, arthouse and blockbusters. It's the right rap, not any rap. (I encountered this framing via Maison Rickie.)
The subcultural/edgy type (Thornton)[5] competes for status within a scene through subcultural capital: knowing the right DJs, the underground clubs, the not-yet-mainstream tracks. Status comes from authenticity and being ahead. Often decoupled from economic capital.
The plural actor (Lahire)[6] embodies contradictory dispositions: highbrow in museums, mainstream in TV, subcultural in music. Most people are plural, not pure types.
Adapting the method
The Bookmark Method works for any profile, but the approach shifts:
Highbrow: Curate institutional sources (museum accounts, serious publications, academic feeds). The pattern reveals your position within legitimate culture. What resonates: the austere or the ornate? The classical or the modernist?
Omnivore: Accumulate across high and low deliberately. The pattern reveals your unique combination across worlds. That combination is your signature, valuable because it's eclectic and hard to copy.
Subcultural: Follow scene insiders, not algorithms. The pattern reveals your authenticity claims and underground positioning. What keeps appearing: the accessible underground or the obscure?
Middlebrow: The method helps you discover which mainstream you resonate with. Quality TV has many flavors. The pattern distinguishes your specific middlebrow.
Plural actor: Run the method separately in different domains. The pattern reveals your composite identity across worlds.
That's the what. You own the decision.
But why does saving things reveal anything at all?
Why it works
The bookmark captures resonance (Rosa)[7]: a connection that happens before you can explain it. You don't know why the reel appeals to you; you just feel it. Saving externalizes that resonance for later excavation.
The batch review transforms resonance into knowledge through focal attention (Borgmann)[8]: protected time, sustained engagement, deliberate output. The bookmark captures resonance. The batch review crystallizes it.
The method makes taste formation visible. Usually taste development is invisible. You consume for years, and one day you "just know." The Bookmark Method externalizes the process. Each save is a data point. The batch review reveals the pattern. You can watch yourself develop taste in real time.
There's a paradox here. The method presents itself as discovery: your taste was always there, buried in the saves, waiting to be excavated. But it's also construction. Each save reinforces the pattern. Each batch review crystallizes judgment. You're not just finding yourself; you're teaching yourself.
And you're teaching the algorithm too. Instagram watches what you save. It adjusts what it shows. The feed changes. New content resonates. New saves accumulate. The loop closes. You're shaping your taste, which shapes your feed, which shapes your taste.
This isn't a bug. It's the method working. The alternative is passive consumption, where the algorithm shapes you without your input. Here, you're in the loop, actively steering. Not full control, but leverage.
Why now
Fifty years ago, taste was scarce because access was scarce. You had to go to the museum to see art. Today, you can see more design in a week than a Renaissance apprentice saw in a lifetime. Instagram, YouTube, Figma. The bottleneck isn't exposure anymore.
The bottleneck shifted. Now it's curation—judgment about what matters in the noise. Consume everything without saving anything, and Instagram owns your taste.
Before: owning an original painting meant you had money. Now: knowing which paintings matter means you have judgment. The difference isn't what you saw, but what you kept and what you did with it.
Everyone says taste matters in the age of AI. Paul Graham, Brian Chesky, Karri Saarinen. In Tech Ateliers, Not Big Tech, I argued that taste is built through apprenticeship. But what if you're not at 37signals or Hermès? What if you're alone?
The Bookmark Method is how you train your own eye. Apprenticeship is faster—a master corrects your mistakes in real time. But this works alone, works at any scale, works in any domain. It's the backup plan for building taste when the atelier isn't available.
Why most methods fail
Here's the reason most productivity methods fail: they require nothing of you (except maybe paying for the course).
The Bookmark Method requires something: at least an hour of uninterrupted attention. That friction is the feature. It filters for people who actually want to know themselves.
Everyone accumulates. Bookmark folders fill up. Pinterest boards grow. But almost no one does the review. I've recommended this method to many people. They all nod. None follow through.
The dopamine economy swims against you. Every platform optimizes for immediate engagement. The bookmark is anti-FOMO architecture: it says "I'll deal with this later." That goes against every design incentive.
Most platforms have bad tooling. Twitter's bookmarks are a graveyard. LinkedIn's saved items are chaos. Only Instagram (collections) and Pinterest (boards) do this well. Friction kills the practice before it starts.
It feels like nothing is happening. For months, you're just saving things. No immediate payoff. No dopamine hit. The reward only comes at the end.
That resistance? It's the method working.
Your turn
Forty job postings revealed what I couldn't articulate. 1,132 saved reels showed me I love whisky cocktails, comforting food, and blue velvet—not because I decided to, but because the pattern was already there.
Your bookmarks are more honest than your words. They show who you're becoming before you can explain it.
Most people treat saved items as a graveyard. The folder fills, stales, gets cleared. Start over. But that graveyard contains data. The pattern of what made you pause, what sparked something before you could explain it.
Instagram wants you dissolving. The Bookmark Method is the counter-move: using the device to build a focal practice. Accumulate resonance. Extract patterns. Crystallize judgment from the same feed designed to melt it.
Stop treating your saves as deferred consumption. Start digging.
In six months, the pattern will tell you what you didn't know you knew.
David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757): "Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character." ↩︎
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979): "The habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions." ↩︎
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979): "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make." ↩︎
Richard A. Peterson, "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore" (1996): "Elite status is increasingly signaled by the breadth of one's cultural tastes and practices. [...] The old pattern of highbrow snob is being replaced by the omnivore." ↩︎
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures (1995): "Subcultural capital confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder. [...] It is embodied in the form of being 'in the know', using (but not over-using) current slang and looking as if you were born to perform the latest dance styles." ↩︎
Bernard Lahire, The Plural Actor (2011): "Each individual is the depositary of dispositions to think, feel and act that are the products of multiple and sometimes contradictory socialising experiences." ↩︎
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance (2019): "Resonance is a specific mode of relating to the world, formed through affect and emotion, intrinsic interest, and perceived self-efficacy, in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed." ↩︎
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984): "A focal thing is something that of itself has an engaging and centering power. [...] Focal practices are the ways in which we attend to focal things." ↩︎