Treat Your to-Read Pile Like a River, Not a Bucket

• “The real trouble, according to the leading techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn’t information overload, but “filter failure”. We needed – and we’d eventually get – more sophisticated ways to filter the wheat from the online chaff. And then we’d no longer feel overwhelmed.” ⤴️
• “It’s not that you’re deluged with things you don’t care about, and need help figuring out what’s truly of interest. It’s that you’re overwhelmed by things you do want to read.” ⤴️
• “all of them seem like they might be right up your street, or crucial to your professional success, or might contain some nugget of wisdom you’d benefit from absorbing.” ⤴️
• “the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.” ⤴️
• “It’s that I’m confronted on a daily basis, in Carr’s words, by “haystack-sized piles of needles."" ⤴️
• “the attempt to divide our finite time and attention among too many things that all have a legitimate claim on them.” ⤴️
• “Others are the familiar problems of Life Under Late Capitalism™, like the feeling that there’s simply not enough time in the day to be a good parent while staying afloat financially. What they all have in common is that the things you’re choosing between all genuinely matter, and would benefit from more time than you can give them.” ⤴️
• “It’s about becoming more efficient and organised, or better at prioritising, with the implied promise that you might thereby eliminate or disregard enough of life’s unimportant nonsense to make time for the meaningful stuff. T” ⤴️
• “It’s not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your “big rocks”, but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.” ⤴️
• “treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” ⤴️
• “you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library” ⤴️
• “it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.” ⤴️
• “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams)” ⤴️