Cleaning Out the Netflix Queue

My Netflix queue has gotten out of control. Big time. It’s well over 200 titles long, and that’s just kind of ridiculous. It doesn’t help that a lot of titles on there are ones that have been on there for years. I’ve found that once I pass over a title often enough, I stop thinking of it as a “potentially good movie”–even though I obviously thought it would be a good movie at some point in time. After all, I was the one who stuck it on that list in the first place, right?

So I’m weeding out the list. It’s taking some time, and I’m having to do it over the course of several days, just because I don’t have that much free time available to me right now, and this feels an awful lot like work.

I’ve started by taking off the low rated movies. If Netflix thinks I’m going to give it less than three out of five stars, then the odds are low that I’ll every actually want to watch that movie. There will always be something I want to watch more. So off it goes! Then I’m taking off the ones that I’m not dying to see–that I know Denisa has no desire to see, either. We watch almost all of these movies together, so unless something’s “Must See” for me, it needs to go off that list if I know Denisa isn’t going to want to watch it.

Through this approach, I’ve been able to get the list down below 200 now. That’s progress, right? I’m not sure where I’ll go from here. Part of me is really close to just deleting the whole list and starting from scratch. Limit myself to a queue of about 10 or so in instant and DVD, respectively. Then I could let myself add another 5 movies once 5 of the movies that are on the list get watched.

Anyone else out there a Netflix junkie? How do you decide what to watch when? All ideas are welcome!