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A significant and recurring step for myself has been recognizing that in my scramble to consume everything that seemed interesting I was trying to hoard somethi

by GHFigs 16y ago

A significant and recurring step for myself has been recognizing that in my scramble to consume everything that seemed interesting I was trying to hoard something that's in rampant abundance. You will never have enough time to dick around on the Internet, because there will always be new things that seem interesting. The most interesting thing in the world will be the thing you mark "Read Later" in the moments before you die. It never ends. You will. What you've got to recognize in this is that "Does this seem interesting?" is not a good heuristic for reading / watching / listening / doing. It's the natural and intuitive one we're all equipped with, but it fails in a world of abundance. To get out of the trap you've got to internalize a rule more like "Do I need this for something?" or "Can I safely ignore this?" or "Am I going to act on this?" Try it with the tabs you've got open right now and see how you feel.

zheng 16y ago
Amazing point. Unlike an above commenter, I often spend more time on a site like HN because so much more of the content seems "interesting". However, this isn't the right metric, and you are spot on with that.
nooneelse 16y ago
Another angle to see that the new "interesting stuff" pile is effectively unlimited is to look at where you go when you have some minutes to spend on interesting stuff. If you are often needing to go back to that "Read Later" pile to find anything interesting enough to read, well, then maybe there isn't much new stuff coming in that you are interested in. But me, I very rarely have to go back into that "Read Later" pile to use free minutes of brain-time. If none of the aggregators have anything of merit, a couple of searches related to "the topic I'm into at the moment" gets more than I could read in a week. This empirical fact is something I try to use to slow the rate of additions to my "Read Later" queue.

by GHFigs 16y ago

zheng 16y ago

Amazing point. Unlike an above commenter, I often spend more time on a site like HN because so much more of the content seems "interesting". However, this isn't the right metric, and you are spot on with that.

nooneelse 16y ago

Another angle to see that the new "interesting stuff" pile is effectively unlimited is to look at where you go when you have some minutes to spend on interesting stuff. If you are often needing to go back to that "Read Later" pile to find anything interesting enough to read, well, then maybe there isn't much new stuff coming in that you are interested in. But me, I very rarely have to go back into that "Read Later" pile to use free minutes of brain-time. If none of the aggregators have anything of merit, a couple of searches related to "the topic I'm into at the moment" gets more than I could read in a week. This empirical fact is something I try to use to slow the rate of additions to my "Read Later" queue.