Treat your reading list like a river

There are so many books and articles I want to read, videos I want to watch, podcasts I want to listen to, and posts I want to write. But my desires always clash headfirst with reality: time is finite, while the list of things I want to consume is infinite.

​For the longest time, I felt anxious and constantly looked for every opportunity to “optimize” my time so I could consume more. I didn’t realize that I was letting the consumption itself consume me, rather than facing the obvious truth: I will never be able to read and watch everything on my list.

​That was until I discovered this wonderful post by Oliver Burkeman about a year ago. It’s a piece I keep returning to whenever I feel overwhelmed, anxious, or filled with angst about having so little time.

​I’ve had to make peace with the fact that reading and watching it all is simply impossible. I have to accept that my “Read Later” apps and bookmarking tools are a black hole—a place where many great things begin a one-way journey, never to return.

There’s definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it’s insoluble – that you definitely won’t be fitting everything in. (Of course some such problems, where just scraping a living feels impossible, demand political solutions too – a topic for another time.) 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.

To return to information overload: this means 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). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.