39 ms·

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket

404 points by pps 4y ago

4pkjai 4y ago
You the reader, should treat this article like a river and read only the second last paragraph.
- jagged-chisel 4y ago
  Not sure about the analogy, but definitely appreciate the advice. Edit: I get now. '...a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a choice item...'
- Quixotica1 4y ago
  Thanks for the tip.
- haswell 4y ago
  I understand what you’re trying to do with this comment, but arguably the river in this case is HN. The paragraph you mention is the tangible advice, but articulating the problem is in my mind even more important than the advice itself. Advice is just advice. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t. The problem is what remains. The problem if well articulated either validates the advice, or gives the reader information to process for themselves and from which personal insight can be reached. The advice without the problem is just some guy on the Internet telling you what to do, and that, to me, is rather uninteresting.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I think many people are struggling with the same issues independently, all across society. This is equally true right now as it is in other times. Perhaps there are many who have identified the problem without settling on a satisfying solution. In these cases the context is already (painfully) familiar and the main insight will be the path forward out of their malaise. What you say is true for those who have never even grappled with the question, but I assume HN harbors folks who like to analyze inefficiencies in their lives, so I'd expect most of those here who already have reading lists to have contended with this problem and at least attempted to search for solutions in the past.
- StrangeATractor 4y ago
  They could have fit it all in the headline tbh but there'd be nothing to click past that.
- baxtr 4y ago
  You the reader should only read the second last paragraph, which I copied here for your convenience: 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.
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    Eliminate the waste in your 'to read' pile by populating it the same way he suggests selecting from it - pluck a few choice items here and there from the river that is the British Library.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dmix 4y ago
    I asked GPT4 to summarize the article's most important information into bullet points, which I find more useful than one paragraph summaries: > 1) The initial belief that technology would help filter out irrelevant information and prevent overload has not come to fruition; instead, people are overwhelmed by content they genuinely want to read. > 2) The problem lies in the fact that our filters are too successful, causing us to face a daily influx of interesting content (referred to as "haystack-sized piles of needles"). > 3) Many aspects of life also involve "too many needles," where we struggle to allocate our limited time and attention to numerous important tasks or interests. > 4) Conventional productivity advice, which emphasizes efficiency, organization, and prioritization, falls short in addressing the challenge of having too many significant priorities. > 5) The proposed solution is to treat the to-read pile as a river, selectively choosing items to engage with while accepting the inherent impossibility of clearing the entire backlog, thus leading to a more liberating and realistic approach to information overload. The downside of doing the above is it's more generic and loses the punch of the prose. Always the main issue with skipping the reading to get to the meat. Obviously easier for non-fiction than fiction.
jyscao 4y ago
I think most people end up doing what he's suggesting anyway, out of necessity. I suppose his key insight is to just stop feeling guilty about not being able to get through it all.
acomjean 4y ago
In my younger years I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Economist. Both full of interesting stuff, but a torrent. I had to unsubscribe as I kept on thinking, I'll finish that one later, but never did before the next one arrived. Great magazines for a flight, where time seems boundless, and you were connection-less, before the internet found its way onto airplanes. You have to filter. Music, youtube, book content is created faster than you can consume in your limited time on this planet. I read mainly for information, and try spend more time with friends/ hobbies. Still catch some TV, but I try to limit.
- StrangeATractor 4y ago
  The New Yorker is great when you have the time. It seems like the Economist has really trimmed the article length over the years though, probably in response to web analytics.
criddell 4y ago
I think the new AI tools are going to help me a great deal. There are books that I know I’m not going to read but I’d still like the Cliffs Notes distillation. I think an AI that understands my areas of interest could create personalized summaries of those books. I’m also looking forward to seeing if the new AIs work as better recommendation engines. Again, once the AI gets to know me, I’d love to be able to ask “I want to learn how to sew a messenger-type bag. Where do I start?” Hopefully I’d get back a list of books, videos, and local craftspeople. (And I actually do want to learn that…)
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Have you tried https://www.blinkist.com/en https://www.blinkist.com/en
  - criddell 4y ago
    No. Have you? Would you recommend it? I can’t help but think their time is running out. AIs are going to be able to produce the book summary and maybe even generate the audio version of that too.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      I have not, because I actually prefer to read the full book, even if my Tsundoku keeps growing. Another way that I look at it is that even if I compressed my unread books into summaries, I would then just get more and more summaries, ending up with the same problem. I recommended it to you because it sounds like you really want to read the books you have or are accumulating, so you might find it valuable, even if I don't.
      - criddell 4y ago
        I prefer to read the full book as well, I just know that there are certain books for which that will never happen. For example, I would love to have already read one of those 4” thick biographies of Winston Churchill but I have almost no desire to start reading one of them.
vuciv1 4y ago
One way I've been managing this is by reading summaries of certain books. While it can be difficult to decide which books deserve a full read, this approach has significantly reduced the stress I feel about my ever-growing "to-read" pile. By focusing on the most important ideas and insights, I can still learn and grow without feeling the pressure to read every single book on my list.
- arbitrage 4y ago
  > reading summaries of certain books Careful with this. You have to trust that the summary is correct. Which, as it turns out, isn't as foolproof as one might hope for. It turns out that a sizeable percentage of human reviewers and condensers of information just make stuff up. And if you're just consuming the summary of a work, how would you know?
labrador 4y ago
Something that helped me was to develop my "discernment" of "quality" so I could quickly reject material that appeared interesting but actually was of little use to me. This is going to be different for each person, but I think it's worth putting some thought into because I had previously assumed I had developed a natural talent for it when actually I was consuming content out of habit.
uoaei 4y ago
The best tip I've heard is similar to that in the article, and is basically a mandate to acknowledge and consciously reject the sunk cost fallacy. In simple words, don't be afraid to put down a book before you've finished it if it hasn't seized you in the first pages.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  That could never work for me personally. A book isn't something that's uniform in quality or engagement throughout, in fact they're often predictably lopsided where the the first few pages are getting you familiar with the characters and setting. I also have to know the ending to even begin to think about the book as a whole. Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    Authors pay a lot of attention to the first few pages of their books, and try to expose the best aspects of their writing style there in order to hook you in. I try to remain conscious of this as I read in order to better anticipate the style and content curation that follows. > I don't regret the time spent finishing them I think this is a different take than many others would have on the topic of reading. I know I regret spending time reading things that do not "spark joy", to put it pithily.
    - sfink 4y ago
      For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the unrepresentative intro portion—I appreciate a punchy and/or gripping opening scene, but it's not very well correlated to how much I'll enjoy the rest of the text. It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)
bueno 4y ago
I’m the developer of an iOS and iPadOS app that I think is relevant here. My app Ephemera is a simple read-later application that places expiration dates on every link you add. If you don’t read the article in time, it disappears forever. The app isn’t for everyone, but if you are buried under the torrent of information you “think” you should read, I have found that Ephemera helps me focus and actually read more. You can find the app here: https://deadpan.io/ephemera/ https://deadpan.io/ephemera/ I’d love for Hacker News to check it out!
- FireInsight 4y ago
  Something I stored disappearing feels like a stressful concept to me, but maybe it works for some.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Clearly. Some people enjoy Snapchat even if I find it to be about as useful - and a lot less entertaining - as Twitter.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      As you probably guessed, Snapchat doesn't really get deleted. I sat as a juror on a case where some of the most damning evidence was a Snapchat the police obtained from the company following an armed robbery and car theft. Some people are really poor at planning and covering their tracks.
- faeyanpiraat 4y ago
  I actually solved this without an app. I realized I had around 10k "read later" items in my bookmarks folder in Chrome, and I simply deleted all of them.
  - rcme 4y ago
    Yes. Most information is truly worthless.
a_c 4y ago
So is your product backlog. Most of them doesn't matter. Throw them away and rethink what matter most at the very moment. It is hard to do if you are continuously "sprinting". Or it doesn't matter if you outsourced the thinking of "what matters" to someone else.
petarb 4y ago
As someone wanting to read lots of books and articles, this really resonates with me. Not having to read everything but picking and choosing a few here and there
throw0101b 4y ago
My local library has a limit of having 100 books on hold (which I hit during 2020 lockdowns when there were closed for a while). My current hold list is ~60, and the system allows you to put 'pause' a hold until a certain day so that they don't all arrive at once: so I have holds going out to July. By the system also has a "saved" books feature where it allows you to simply bookmark stuff of interest (and categorize/tag them) but not ask the library to deliver them. My saved list is ~1200. I don't expect to actually get to them, but I have options for my next item. (I long ago gave up buying books (except in very rare cases) just because I don't have space.)
par 4y ago
I had read some books on kindle here and there over the years,but recently switched over to full time on the kindle. And I must say, there is a distinct pleasure in carrying multiple books with me, and switching between them at will. I have been trying to replace bouncing around apps on my phone with bouncing around books on my kindle and it's been very enjoyable. Reduces pressure to finish any single book, and a lot more freedom to bounce around!
mxuribe 4y ago
I enjoyed reading this, but was left with the same feeling that i had at the end of the 1983 film WarGames, namely: "...the only winning move is not to play..." I acknowledge this post is not exactly saying that...but it still feels a little flattening to arrive at that point. (With all apologies and respect to the author, i'm referring to my feelings on the suggestions, that's all.)
- alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
  I agree with your summary but to me it seems like a useful point of insight. Analogous to the saying "when you find yourself in a hole that's getting deeper the first thing to do is stop digging". Something that seems like common sense but is hard to grasp when you're in the hole, unless someone explicitly points it out. One might also decide that this article is wrong, but it could still be worth considering the point to reject it.
- whateveruserk 4y ago
  the perspective i take is more like.. “the only winning move is to play. not analyze how you play or hold yourself to how you once planned to play.” here that would mean releasing things, and fully enjoying whatever it is you are able to read/participate in. mainly not grasping at everything
khalilravanna 4y ago
I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list. The important parts for me were: * Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games * Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next * Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall. Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off. This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs. EDIT If anyone wants to make their own list and wants some data to start, here's ~1000 games to start with my data with some of the more personal columns pruned out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023-03-29.csv?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023... Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/ https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically. Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!
- ptato 4y ago
  I've thought about setting up something like this before for myself. You might have given me the motivation I needed...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperthesis 4y ago
Tempest1981 4y ago
For me, it's much more rewarding to find those "needles" and add them to my reading list -- than to actually read them. I.e. the dopamine hit of finding something new/interesting -- that's the thrill. I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?
petecooper 4y ago
I'm mildly disgusted (and entirely unsurprised) with myself that I just added this to a reading list for later.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  It’s cool man, let it just float on by
  - petecooper 4y ago
    …tell that to my 994 bookmarked 'read later' URLs. Very much a case of best intentions but woeful discipline.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      How many of them has already rot? I've found that 70% of ten-year-ago bookmarks of mine do not exist anymore, especially if it was a weblog or a youtube video.
martincmartin 4y ago
Anyone have a tl;dr for this?
- shoy 4y ago
  Don't sweat it, man. Stay loose.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >Anyone have a tl;dr for this? Just save the link for later reading[0]. [0] And who knows, you might even read it.
- janvdberg 4y ago
  I asked ChatGPT: The article discusses the problem of having too much information and too many choices, which can be overwhelming and lead to a feeling of not being able to accomplish everything. The author suggests that the solution is not to try to filter or prioritize better, but to accept that there will always be more to do than can be done and to make choices based on what is most important at the moment. The author also suggests treating the "to-read" pile like a river, picking and choosing what to read as it flows by rather than feeling the need to read everything.
shever73 4y ago
I agree with the concept, but I tend to view my to-read pile more like a sushi conveyor than a river. Assuming I'm still interested later in what I have to read, then it can come round again.
synergy20 4y ago
I have too many good books queued for never-reading-before-i-die, but it makes me feel good, and feel phony knowledgeable.
- pps 4y ago
  There is this concept of antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary
jh00ker 4y ago
Bookmarked this for later! The headline looks REALLY interesting!
lumb63 4y ago
That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to. I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance. The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time. There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.
- gopalv 4y ago
  > an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. But it needs to be said and repeated, right? Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there. And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't. You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating. The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't. As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
- FalconSensei 4y ago
  > That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. And yet you added even more with your comment :)
greenspam 4y ago
Nice article. I just put it to my to-read list.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CrypticShift 4y ago
I think LLMs could definitely help us stop treating large piles as "lists" (to be completed). You can just "dialogue" with it through Chat. And if the AI has access to your recent activities or notes, it can even give you relevant choices. Or you can "navigate" through it in an interactive 2D/3D map that clusters the article/books by (semantic) similarity. So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Though... It just deepens the problems of curation of all the content everyone consumes through relatively opaque and unpredictable means.
  - CrypticShift 4y ago
    Yes, more opaque and unpredictable for sure, but I don’t think it deepens the problems of curation. I believe it is solution. : you trade predictability/transparency for smarter /non-linear curation. You can always choose.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      I just worry about the biases in models becoming our biases, and self-perpetuating.
sakisv 4y ago
The lede is buried near the end: > 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. I find the analogy with the British library spot on, and very liberating.
avg_dev 4y ago
Never heard of this person before but was pleasantly surprised by the content. In my own life, I have spent decades plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and I had many varied areas of focus and felt like I didn’t really progress on anything. That in itself (the feeling of lack of progress) was I think kind of misleading, as I did progress on some things (though I clearly regressed on some things as well). I don’t really know how it happened but I have made some significant shifts in my life. I started to become physically active again, I stopped smoking cigarettes and some other unhealthy habits, I started really developing and digging into some of my active and creative passions like writing, playing a musical instrument, and renewing my focus on coding to an end and with purpose and quality in mind. Somehow I started finding that I had much more energy and time available for everything. And as opportunities arose I began to seize them. It was a very exciting period for me. Eventually, my plate really became too full, and things began to suffer (mostly me) and I started to say no to things, and continue to keep my focus on what I really think is important. I feel that it has taught me about the interconnected nature of my life, and about how to value my time, how to slow down and appreciate something, how to deal with my emotions head on instead of taking years or decades to process events in my life (I am sure there have and will be many exceptions to what I have said), how to actively take stock of my current situation and change my plans as needed, how to deal with the fact that my expectations for things very rarely match up with reality, how to stop being an intellectual purist and idealist while still deeply valuing a good idea and pursuing my ideals. I look back at how much I have accomplished the last year and I can’t help thinking everything came from stopping trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing (or so it felt), and by embracing what really mattered to me when it was in front of me. I learned to float down the river, I guess. Lazily most of the time. But when I feel it is necessary, I can exert more power in changing my trajectory than ever I could before.
- nell 4y ago
  His books are enjoyable, I'd recommend his most recent one "Four thousand weeks" and the previous one "The Antidote" as well. Especially if you're overwhelmed or gets hit with anxiety often.
  - 4y ago
t344344 4y ago
I found most books are just garbage. Take Moby-Dick for example, interesting story that could be compressed to two pages, but it is 400 pages of boring stuff, that goes on and on. And it can not be criticized as it is "fundamental corner stone of American literature"! Watching documentary about original story, and a few pieces about 19 century whale hunting, is much better use of time!
bluGill 4y ago
My todo list is the same way. I expect to finish everything currently one it somewhere around my 3000th birthday. I just prioritize what needs to be done now, and then what I can do know that feels interesting at the moment. The rest I'll do latter Note that there is nothing on the list about expanding human lifespan. There are some things that get priority around exercise and eating good food, but that is as close as it gets.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup. Discovered this in hard data after I built by first ToDo/Task Managemtn application, then populated with current projects. I soon discovered that I had 768 hours of Critical and High importance items that needed to be completed in the next two weeks. For reference, there are only 168hrs*2=336 hours in a fortnight. Not. Going. To. Happen. So, that list gets post-filtered in real time ... Seems to be the plague of the ambitious and/or conscientious — We should be happy that our reach exceeds our grasp
HPsquared 4y ago
My to-do list is not a big truck! It's not something you just dump something on... It's a series of tubes!
- pps 4y ago
  Interesting, could you tell us more? :)
longnguyen 4y ago
An interesting read! I sorta solved this with my little SaaS[0]. I send interesting articles and RSS feeds to my Kindle, and I read some of them every evening before bed time. Articles never stayed in a “bucket” but they flow every day. Not worth reading, ignore it. And I can always find them later if needed (hint: it will never be) If you read a lot of online content, give it a try [0]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io
- heyoni 4y ago
  How is this different than kindles own browser extension? Is it the conversion quality? What couldn’t the extension do that ktool does?
  - longnguyen 4y ago
    Yes to conversion quality. For example, the official extension has a huge problem with detecting the cover. I fixed it with KTool. I also implemented custom parsers for many sites that use a “modern” frontend framework (read: SPA) And here is the main difference: ability to send RSS feeds and newsletters to Kindle, combine them into only 1 ebook and read at a specific time you set. I think it’s better to compare KTool to other alternatives like p2k or instapaper. The official extension did an OK job if you don’t need any features above.
dimitrios1 4y ago
I ended up treating my bookcase full of all my unread books I originally planned to work through like this. In this case my bookcase is the bucket, and I carve a stream or a river out of it. It's like a two step filtering process. It just probably would have been cheaper for me to just bought the ones I actually would read. But sometimes you can't escape the fantasy of you being some higher intellectual who will one day work through all of these books. I realize now that I probably will never make it through that Modern Algebra text, Operating Systems, or the complete collection of William Shakespear by the Royal Shakespear company -- so I humor myself while being realistic about the progress I can make.
Hadriel 4y ago
tldr: "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."
npunt 4y ago
I organize my Obsidian around this concept, separating out different streams for different domains of content I'm interested in. Social, AI, Antilibrary, Wisdom, generic Inbox, and my own Passing Thoughts and Story Prompts. I treat each of these streams as an input to growing my understanding & thinking in these domains, much like a stream of water nourishes plants around it. It's a big unlock to do things this way, because it treats inputs as opportunities not tasks. Different streams flow at different rates based on where my initial interests lie and based on interesting things happening in the world. Sort of biomimicry in action in the intellectual realm
- lawrenceyan 4y ago
  I've been using Google Keep mostly, but tried Obsidian for a bit. Is it worth the transition?
  - jotson 4y ago
    I switched from Keep to Obsidian as well. It depends on your goals. For me, I was saving things in Keep that I wanted to have forever and I don't trust Google to operate the service forever. The exported data is also not super portable. And there are things I want to save that I don't want on a cloud service. So I switched to Obsidian which gives me a simple and portable file format, privacy, and I trust myself to keep those files safe more than I trust Google.
  - npunt 4y ago
    If all you need is a short term cache of ephemeral things that won't matter in a year, Google Keep is probably fine. If you want something that you invest in that stores thoughts and ideas that you want to go back to later, I'd use something far more reliable. I'd look at: * Whether the product is a revenue driver for the company * Whether the company has a history of good behavior * Whether the company seems like they care about their users & making a good product * Whether you have control over the data, including an open file format Personally I wouldn't touch Keep because none of the above apply.
nasir 4y ago
Just added this to my to read list!
switowski 4y ago
Sounds useful, I will read it later!
gspencley 4y ago
> After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library This article was clearly NOT written for me :(
karaterobot 4y ago
I have an English Lit degree, and the following advice from a professor almost made it worthwhile: "if you're reading for pleasure, and it's not pleasurable, put the book down. Give the author 50 pages, and if they haven't made it worth your time, move on to the next book." I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  Absolutely. "I must finish everything on my plate" mentality is unnecessary masochism. I recall plowing through ~2/3 of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and then losing interest. I picked up "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" today to be my new bathroom reader.
- randomluck040 4y ago
  Sunk cost fallacy is playing its part as well I think. I can’t bring myself to read anything I don’t like anymore. I’m a slow reader so working through a book takes its time and I want to get the best possible experience out of it. Won’t happen if I don’t like the book. It’s not only valid for books but everything else: series, movies, video games. If it doesn’t work, why push it?
  - Moissanite 4y ago
    Some of it also comes from prior impressions that a book is "worth reading". Take Wealth of Nations as an example. It inspired, arguably, the whole field of economics - and yet after a hundred or so pages of reading about the worth of the labour of a man in Glasgow as compared to the labour of a man in London, I just wanted someone to end my misery. Alas, I'm afflicted by the "must finish" disease, so I paused reading and keep telling myself I'll get back to it.
    - meling 4y ago
      Same experience with that book; I started listening to the audiobook, but never finished it. Maybe someday.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
I need sandbags because the bookshelf dam is bursting through the overflow gates. No, really, I have stopped buying books because I've ran out of room. I guess I'm going to have to sell and give away some to make room for new ones. )':
candyman 4y ago
To give him credit I have to cite Dave Weiner who for me created the concept of of online information being a "river" which means you can watch it go by and not feel guilty about it. You pick out what you find interesting or important and let the rest go. I've never thought of "zero inbox" as something worth striving for. Just let it go...
dredmorbius 4y ago
First: there's a hell of a lot of wisdom about reading and how to approach it in Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book. That's a perennial favourite of both HN and myself. In particular it addresses the question of how to read different types of books and for different purposes. In detail. In particular, Adler repeatedly stresses the notion of reading as an inquiry, in the sense that you are asking questions of the book and the author. If those questions are rewarded, all the better. If they're not ... you might be better of spending time elsewhere. <https://archive.org/details/howtoreadbook0000adle_y9v4 https://archive.org/details/howtoreadbook0000adle_y9v4> I've referenced it nearly 30 times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22how%20to%20read%20a%20book%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> Disclaimer: I'm only about halfway through it myself, though the book is on my e-reader ;-) On filters, I disagree with Burkeman, it is filter failure, and Burkeman is himself failing to define what sorts of filters are needed. In the context of the "haystack-sized piles of needles", it's useful to consider the question how many needles do I need?, and to simply select a sufficient (and not excessive) number. This does presume that the stacks are of equivalent quality, which can pose a slight challenge, though factors such as reputation and some occasional broad sampling usually address this. In particular, though, in an environment with a surfeit of signals and records, what is needed are cheap, fast, no-regret rejection tools. I've noted this a few times in earlier comments, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795>. In the physical world, our senses and mental capabilities provide us with this: we're tuned to a limited set of stimuli (sight, sound, smell, taste, various touch, proprioception, and inner-state senses such as hunger, thirst, and need to void bowels or bladder). There's a heck of a lot of other signals the Universe provides, we are utterly blind to them for the most part, and our lack of capacity to sense these largely doesn't bother us. Even within our extant sense channels, we can only detect so much: visible light, but not radio or x-rays, the audible spectrum but not infra- or ultra-sonic frequencies, some smells with great sensitivity (petrichor, mercaptin) others not at all (water, carbon monoxide), etc. In the world of data one of the most effective and unbiased rejection methods is random sampling. We usually think of this in terms of data selected, but it could as readily be expressed as data rejected. The reason statisticians sample randomly is because measurement is expensive, and quite often a highly accurate impression of a phenomenon can be gathered from only a few tens or hundreds of individual examples if those themselves are selected without bias or are otherwise representative. For texts and readings, much depends on why you're reading something. If it's simply for entertainment, then the requisite question is "am I being entertained". If it's for information, then the question broadens, but I'd suggest: - Is this actually informative? Is it telling me something I don't already know (rather than reinforcing biases or existing beliefs)? Is it accurate? Is the information durable? - Is this useful? Can I use the information, and will it change a future action or decision of mine? Does it put the past in a more comprehensible light? - If a skill, is the skill taught useful and durable? I and many others have often noted that the base set of Unix / Linux shell tools and editors provides a highly useful and durable skillset, one I first began acquiring 30 to 40 years ago, and still use daily. I've seen many other technical skillsets, including expensive training or books (some at an employers' cost, some at my own), come and go over that same time. - How does this fit with an existing worldview or structure? I've begun specifically cultivating a few of my own ontologies and sense-making structures, and find that these provide useful lenses for assimilating and testing new information. Occasionally I'll find other authors have anticipated my own notions, and the force with which that realisation hits is profound. It's also a strong validation that I'm likely on a useful path, or at least one that others had previously found worth pursuing. All of these boil down to "Is this worth my time?" Note that most news, episodic broadcast media, and online content fares abysmally on the "durability" criterion. I don't ignore these entirely (and struggle immensely with online content), but am highly cognisant that these tend to be the equivalents of fast food. As an occasional treat or spice ... not necessarily bad. But if these are your primary fare ... reconsider your priorities, environment, and patterns. A practice I'm finding useful is to at least periodically consider what has be "BOTI" --- best of the interval. On some basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly), I'll try to cast back over what I've read, heard, or viewed, and consider what's been the most insightful or useful. For the past decade, that title's gone to an Aeon piece by Michael Schulson, "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly", on the value of sortition: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. And yes, that relates to my comments above on random sampling / exclusion rather neatly. As for the first time I realised that there was in fact far more information than I could reasonably access, it was at a library. On entering uni, I remember my first visit to the main campus library, literally a tower of books, holding several million volumes (and part of an even larger collection across other libraries both on campus and at other campuses). What I did instead was to treat the collection as a resource, something to ask questions of, with a few (small) sections explored in detail, many others skipped entirely, and some sampled from selectively. A particular memory was of seeing the film The Last Emperor, a biography of Puyi, the last emperor of China, and largely a Japanese puppet. One scene of the film featured a Time Magazine photographer, and the thought occurred that there was probably a story from that time. I tracked this down and read the story, published in the 1930s, from a copy dating to that time. The experience of "oh, I can track that down" has stuck with me. And yes, losing on-campus access to academic stacks was an absolutely wrenching experience for me, moderated now through the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Library Genesis, ZLibrary, and other resources. And yes, if something's not worth reading, it's not worth reading, as noted in an exchange I had on HN itself over the past day or so.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
GPT3 Summary: The article discusses the issue of having too many things to read, listen to, or watch, and how it can be overwhelming. The author argues that the problem is not a lack of filtering technology, but rather too much information that we actually care about. They suggest that instead of trying to reduce the size of the to-read/listen/watch pile, we should treat it like a river, and pick a few choice items from it, rather than trying to empty the whole pile. The article also emphasizes the need to make tough choices about what matters most in life, and accept that we cannot do everything.
adultSwim 4y ago
This book sounds good. I'll add it to the list.
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway9980 4y ago
Hacker News is my river.
examplary_cable 4y ago
As a loyal cultist, I'll drop here one of the most transformative "educational" or reading technique I have even encoutered: Incremental Reading[0]. I would recommend it to anyone to give it a try, it absolutely changed how I study. [0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Things like this might work for a small fraction of people for whom structure is in and of itself part of the pleasure. For unorganized quacks like me doing all of these “techniques” just ends up being a chore and takes the fun out already mundane things.
everydayentropy 4y ago
If it takes writers as long as this article's author to get to the point, no wonder we have reading buckets/backlogs/rivers/whatever. People optimize for search engines, not brevity and therein lies the problem. Be concise and communicate your idea. That should be the North Star of writers.
jakkos 4y ago
bookmark
prepend 4y ago
I think in this analogy, I am the river and books to read are rocks along the bed. I flow over all the rocks and glean some information worn off the rocks. So I can work on selecting what kind of rocks go into my path that I flow over.
hekec 4y ago
I developed a simple read-later app called Readstack to tackle this problem. The idea is that it forces you to go through pages one-by-one, without postponing. So, if you want to read something, you will have one item on the top of the list, and you need to read it or remove it before you can go to the following items. It helped me reduce my read-later pule to zero. You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/readstack-read-later/id1558413561?l=en https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/readstack-read-later/id1558413...

404 points by pps 4y ago

4pkjai 4y ago

You the reader, should treat this article like a river and read only the second last paragraph.

jagged-chisel 4y ago
Not sure about the analogy, but definitely appreciate the advice. Edit: I get now. '...a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a choice item...'
Quixotica1 4y ago
Thanks for the tip.
haswell 4y ago
I understand what you’re trying to do with this comment, but arguably the river in this case is HN. The paragraph you mention is the tangible advice, but articulating the problem is in my mind even more important than the advice itself. Advice is just advice. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t. The problem is what remains. The problem if well articulated either validates the advice, or gives the reader information to process for themselves and from which personal insight can be reached. The advice without the problem is just some guy on the Internet telling you what to do, and that, to me, is rather uninteresting.
- uoaei 4y ago
  I think many people are struggling with the same issues independently, all across society. This is equally true right now as it is in other times. Perhaps there are many who have identified the problem without settling on a satisfying solution. In these cases the context is already (painfully) familiar and the main insight will be the path forward out of their malaise. What you say is true for those who have never even grappled with the question, but I assume HN harbors folks who like to analyze inefficiencies in their lives, so I'd expect most of those here who already have reading lists to have contended with this problem and at least attempted to search for solutions in the past.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
They could have fit it all in the headline tbh but there'd be nothing to click past that.
baxtr 4y ago
You the reader should only read the second last paragraph, which I copied here for your convenience: 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.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Eliminate the waste in your 'to read' pile by populating it the same way he suggests selecting from it - pluck a few choice items here and there from the river that is the British Library.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dmix 4y ago
  I asked GPT4 to summarize the article's most important information into bullet points, which I find more useful than one paragraph summaries: > 1) The initial belief that technology would help filter out irrelevant information and prevent overload has not come to fruition; instead, people are overwhelmed by content they genuinely want to read. > 2) The problem lies in the fact that our filters are too successful, causing us to face a daily influx of interesting content (referred to as "haystack-sized piles of needles"). > 3) Many aspects of life also involve "too many needles," where we struggle to allocate our limited time and attention to numerous important tasks or interests. > 4) Conventional productivity advice, which emphasizes efficiency, organization, and prioritization, falls short in addressing the challenge of having too many significant priorities. > 5) The proposed solution is to treat the to-read pile as a river, selectively choosing items to engage with while accepting the inherent impossibility of clearing the entire backlog, thus leading to a more liberating and realistic approach to information overload. The downside of doing the above is it's more generic and loses the punch of the prose. Always the main issue with skipping the reading to get to the meat. Obviously easier for non-fiction than fiction.

jyscao 4y ago

I think most people end up doing what he's suggesting anyway, out of necessity. I suppose his key insight is to just stop feeling guilty about not being able to get through it all.

acomjean 4y ago

In my younger years I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Economist. Both full of interesting stuff, but a torrent. I had to unsubscribe as I kept on thinking, I'll finish that one later, but never did before the next one arrived. Great magazines for a flight, where time seems boundless, and you were connection-less, before the internet found its way onto airplanes. You have to filter. Music, youtube, book content is created faster than you can consume in your limited time on this planet. I read mainly for information, and try spend more time with friends/ hobbies. Still catch some TV, but I try to limit.

StrangeATractor 4y ago
The New Yorker is great when you have the time. It seems like the Economist has really trimmed the article length over the years though, probably in response to web analytics.

criddell 4y ago

I think the new AI tools are going to help me a great deal. There are books that I know I’m not going to read but I’d still like the Cliffs Notes distillation. I think an AI that understands my areas of interest could create personalized summaries of those books. I’m also looking forward to seeing if the new AIs work as better recommendation engines. Again, once the AI gets to know me, I’d love to be able to ask “I want to learn how to sew a messenger-type bag. Where do I start?” Hopefully I’d get back a list of books, videos, and local craftspeople. (And I actually do want to learn that…)

andsoitis 4y ago
Have you tried https://www.blinkist.com/en https://www.blinkist.com/en
- criddell 4y ago
  No. Have you? Would you recommend it? I can’t help but think their time is running out. AIs are going to be able to produce the book summary and maybe even generate the audio version of that too.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    I have not, because I actually prefer to read the full book, even if my Tsundoku keeps growing. Another way that I look at it is that even if I compressed my unread books into summaries, I would then just get more and more summaries, ending up with the same problem. I recommended it to you because it sounds like you really want to read the books you have or are accumulating, so you might find it valuable, even if I don't.
    - criddell 4y ago
      I prefer to read the full book as well, I just know that there are certain books for which that will never happen. For example, I would love to have already read one of those 4” thick biographies of Winston Churchill but I have almost no desire to start reading one of them.

vuciv1 4y ago

One way I've been managing this is by reading summaries of certain books. While it can be difficult to decide which books deserve a full read, this approach has significantly reduced the stress I feel about my ever-growing "to-read" pile. By focusing on the most important ideas and insights, I can still learn and grow without feeling the pressure to read every single book on my list.

arbitrage 4y ago
> reading summaries of certain books Careful with this. You have to trust that the summary is correct. Which, as it turns out, isn't as foolproof as one might hope for. It turns out that a sizeable percentage of human reviewers and condensers of information just make stuff up. And if you're just consuming the summary of a work, how would you know?

labrador 4y ago

Something that helped me was to develop my "discernment" of "quality" so I could quickly reject material that appeared interesting but actually was of little use to me. This is going to be different for each person, but I think it's worth putting some thought into because I had previously assumed I had developed a natural talent for it when actually I was consuming content out of habit.

uoaei 4y ago

The best tip I've heard is similar to that in the article, and is basically a mandate to acknowledge and consciously reject the sunk cost fallacy. In simple words, don't be afraid to put down a book before you've finished it if it hasn't seized you in the first pages.

stcroixx 4y ago
That could never work for me personally. A book isn't something that's uniform in quality or engagement throughout, in fact they're often predictably lopsided where the the first few pages are getting you familiar with the characters and setting. I also have to know the ending to even begin to think about the book as a whole. Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Authors pay a lot of attention to the first few pages of their books, and try to expose the best aspects of their writing style there in order to hook you in. I try to remain conscious of this as I read in order to better anticipate the style and content curation that follows. > I don't regret the time spent finishing them I think this is a different take than many others would have on the topic of reading. I know I regret spending time reading things that do not "spark joy", to put it pithily.
  - sfink 4y ago
    For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the unrepresentative intro portion—I appreciate a punchy and/or gripping opening scene, but it's not very well correlated to how much I'll enjoy the rest of the text. It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)

bueno 4y ago

I’m the developer of an iOS and iPadOS app that I think is relevant here. My app Ephemera is a simple read-later application that places expiration dates on every link you add. If you don’t read the article in time, it disappears forever. The app isn’t for everyone, but if you are buried under the torrent of information you “think” you should read, I have found that Ephemera helps me focus and actually read more. You can find the app here: https://deadpan.io/ephemera/ https://deadpan.io/ephemera/ I’d love for Hacker News to check it out!

FireInsight 4y ago
Something I stored disappearing feels like a stressful concept to me, but maybe it works for some.
- eitland 4y ago
  Clearly. Some people enjoy Snapchat even if I find it to be about as useful - and a lot less entertaining - as Twitter.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    As you probably guessed, Snapchat doesn't really get deleted. I sat as a juror on a case where some of the most damning evidence was a Snapchat the police obtained from the company following an armed robbery and car theft. Some people are really poor at planning and covering their tracks.
faeyanpiraat 4y ago
I actually solved this without an app. I realized I had around 10k "read later" items in my bookmarks folder in Chrome, and I simply deleted all of them.
- rcme 4y ago
  Yes. Most information is truly worthless.

a_c 4y ago

So is your product backlog. Most of them doesn't matter. Throw them away and rethink what matter most at the very moment. It is hard to do if you are continuously "sprinting". Or it doesn't matter if you outsourced the thinking of "what matters" to someone else.

petarb 4y ago

As someone wanting to read lots of books and articles, this really resonates with me. Not having to read everything but picking and choosing a few here and there

throw0101b 4y ago

My local library has a limit of having 100 books on hold (which I hit during 2020 lockdowns when there were closed for a while). My current hold list is ~60, and the system allows you to put 'pause' a hold until a certain day so that they don't all arrive at once: so I have holds going out to July. By the system also has a "saved" books feature where it allows you to simply bookmark stuff of interest (and categorize/tag them) but not ask the library to deliver them. My saved list is ~1200. I don't expect to actually get to them, but I have options for my next item. (I long ago gave up buying books (except in very rare cases) just because I don't have space.)

par 4y ago

I had read some books on kindle here and there over the years,but recently switched over to full time on the kindle. And I must say, there is a distinct pleasure in carrying multiple books with me, and switching between them at will. I have been trying to replace bouncing around apps on my phone with bouncing around books on my kindle and it's been very enjoyable. Reduces pressure to finish any single book, and a lot more freedom to bounce around!

mxuribe 4y ago

I enjoyed reading this, but was left with the same feeling that i had at the end of the 1983 film WarGames, namely: "...the only winning move is not to play..." I acknowledge this post is not exactly saying that...but it still feels a little flattening to arrive at that point. (With all apologies and respect to the author, i'm referring to my feelings on the suggestions, that's all.)

alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
I agree with your summary but to me it seems like a useful point of insight. Analogous to the saying "when you find yourself in a hole that's getting deeper the first thing to do is stop digging". Something that seems like common sense but is hard to grasp when you're in the hole, unless someone explicitly points it out. One might also decide that this article is wrong, but it could still be worth considering the point to reject it.
whateveruserk 4y ago
the perspective i take is more like.. “the only winning move is to play. not analyze how you play or hold yourself to how you once planned to play.” here that would mean releasing things, and fully enjoying whatever it is you are able to read/participate in. mainly not grasping at everything

khalilravanna 4y ago

I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list. The important parts for me were: * Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games * Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next * Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall. Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off. This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs. EDIT If anyone wants to make their own list and wants some data to start, here's ~1000 games to start with my data with some of the more personal columns pruned out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023-03-29.csv?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023... Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/ https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically. Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!

ptato 4y ago
I've thought about setting up something like this before for myself. You might have given me the motivation I needed...
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hyperthesis 4y ago

Tempest1981 4y ago

For me, it's much more rewarding to find those "needles" and add them to my reading list -- than to actually read them. I.e. the dopamine hit of finding something new/interesting -- that's the thrill. I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?

petecooper 4y ago

I'm mildly disgusted (and entirely unsurprised) with myself that I just added this to a reading list for later.

imwillofficial 4y ago
It’s cool man, let it just float on by
- petecooper 4y ago
  …tell that to my 994 bookmarked 'read later' URLs. Very much a case of best intentions but woeful discipline.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    How many of them has already rot? I've found that 70% of ten-year-ago bookmarks of mine do not exist anymore, especially if it was a weblog or a youtube video.

martincmartin 4y ago

Anyone have a tl;dr for this?

shoy 4y ago
Don't sweat it, man. Stay loose.
nobody9999 4y ago
>Anyone have a tl;dr for this? Just save the link for later reading[0]. [0] And who knows, you might even read it.
janvdberg 4y ago
I asked ChatGPT: The article discusses the problem of having too much information and too many choices, which can be overwhelming and lead to a feeling of not being able to accomplish everything. The author suggests that the solution is not to try to filter or prioritize better, but to accept that there will always be more to do than can be done and to make choices based on what is most important at the moment. The author also suggests treating the "to-read" pile like a river, picking and choosing what to read as it flows by rather than feeling the need to read everything.

shever73 4y ago

I agree with the concept, but I tend to view my to-read pile more like a sushi conveyor than a river. Assuming I'm still interested later in what I have to read, then it can come round again.

synergy20 4y ago

I have too many good books queued for never-reading-before-i-die, but it makes me feel good, and feel phony knowledgeable.

pps 4y ago
There is this concept of antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

jh00ker 4y ago

Bookmarked this for later! The headline looks REALLY interesting!

lumb63 4y ago

That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to. I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance. The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time. There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.

gopalv 4y ago
> an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. But it needs to be said and repeated, right? Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there. And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't. You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating. The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't. As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
FalconSensei 4y ago
> That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”. And yet you added even more with your comment :)

greenspam 4y ago

Nice article. I just put it to my to-read list.

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CrypticShift 4y ago

I think LLMs could definitely help us stop treating large piles as "lists" (to be completed). You can just "dialogue" with it through Chat. And if the AI has access to your recent activities or notes, it can even give you relevant choices. Or you can "navigate" through it in an interactive 2D/3D map that clusters the article/books by (semantic) similarity. So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.

mlyle 4y ago
Though... It just deepens the problems of curation of all the content everyone consumes through relatively opaque and unpredictable means.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  Yes, more opaque and unpredictable for sure, but I don’t think it deepens the problems of curation. I believe it is solution. : you trade predictability/transparency for smarter /non-linear curation. You can always choose.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    I just worry about the biases in models becoming our biases, and self-perpetuating.

sakisv 4y ago

The lede is buried near the end: > 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. I find the analogy with the British library spot on, and very liberating.

avg_dev 4y ago

Never heard of this person before but was pleasantly surprised by the content. In my own life, I have spent decades plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and I had many varied areas of focus and felt like I didn’t really progress on anything. That in itself (the feeling of lack of progress) was I think kind of misleading, as I did progress on some things (though I clearly regressed on some things as well). I don’t really know how it happened but I have made some significant shifts in my life. I started to become physically active again, I stopped smoking cigarettes and some other unhealthy habits, I started really developing and digging into some of my active and creative passions like writing, playing a musical instrument, and renewing my focus on coding to an end and with purpose and quality in mind. Somehow I started finding that I had much more energy and time available for everything. And as opportunities arose I began to seize them. It was a very exciting period for me. Eventually, my plate really became too full, and things began to suffer (mostly me) and I started to say no to things, and continue to keep my focus on what I really think is important. I feel that it has taught me about the interconnected nature of my life, and about how to value my time, how to slow down and appreciate something, how to deal with my emotions head on instead of taking years or decades to process events in my life (I am sure there have and will be many exceptions to what I have said), how to actively take stock of my current situation and change my plans as needed, how to deal with the fact that my expectations for things very rarely match up with reality, how to stop being an intellectual purist and idealist while still deeply valuing a good idea and pursuing my ideals. I look back at how much I have accomplished the last year and I can’t help thinking everything came from stopping trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing (or so it felt), and by embracing what really mattered to me when it was in front of me. I learned to float down the river, I guess. Lazily most of the time. But when I feel it is necessary, I can exert more power in changing my trajectory than ever I could before.

nell 4y ago
His books are enjoyable, I'd recommend his most recent one "Four thousand weeks" and the previous one "The Antidote" as well. Especially if you're overwhelmed or gets hit with anxiety often.
- 4y ago

t344344 4y ago

I found most books are just garbage. Take Moby-Dick for example, interesting story that could be compressed to two pages, but it is 400 pages of boring stuff, that goes on and on. And it can not be criticized as it is "fundamental corner stone of American literature"! Watching documentary about original story, and a few pieces about 19 century whale hunting, is much better use of time!

bluGill 4y ago

My todo list is the same way. I expect to finish everything currently one it somewhere around my 3000th birthday. I just prioritize what needs to be done now, and then what I can do know that feels interesting at the moment. The rest I'll do latter Note that there is nothing on the list about expanding human lifespan. There are some things that get priority around exercise and eating good food, but that is as close as it gets.

toss1 4y ago
Yup. Discovered this in hard data after I built by first ToDo/Task Managemtn application, then populated with current projects. I soon discovered that I had 768 hours of Critical and High importance items that needed to be completed in the next two weeks. For reference, there are only 168hrs*2=336 hours in a fortnight. Not. Going. To. Happen. So, that list gets post-filtered in real time ... Seems to be the plague of the ambitious and/or conscientious — We should be happy that our reach exceeds our grasp

HPsquared 4y ago

My to-do list is not a big truck! It's not something you just dump something on... It's a series of tubes!

pps 4y ago
Interesting, could you tell us more? :)

longnguyen 4y ago

An interesting read! I sorta solved this with my little SaaS[0]. I send interesting articles and RSS feeds to my Kindle, and I read some of them every evening before bed time. Articles never stayed in a “bucket” but they flow every day. Not worth reading, ignore it. And I can always find them later if needed (hint: it will never be) If you read a lot of online content, give it a try [0]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io

heyoni 4y ago
How is this different than kindles own browser extension? Is it the conversion quality? What couldn’t the extension do that ktool does?
- longnguyen 4y ago
  Yes to conversion quality. For example, the official extension has a huge problem with detecting the cover. I fixed it with KTool. I also implemented custom parsers for many sites that use a “modern” frontend framework (read: SPA) And here is the main difference: ability to send RSS feeds and newsletters to Kindle, combine them into only 1 ebook and read at a specific time you set. I think it’s better to compare KTool to other alternatives like p2k or instapaper. The official extension did an OK job if you don’t need any features above.

dimitrios1 4y ago

I ended up treating my bookcase full of all my unread books I originally planned to work through like this. In this case my bookcase is the bucket, and I carve a stream or a river out of it. It's like a two step filtering process. It just probably would have been cheaper for me to just bought the ones I actually would read. But sometimes you can't escape the fantasy of you being some higher intellectual who will one day work through all of these books. I realize now that I probably will never make it through that Modern Algebra text, Operating Systems, or the complete collection of William Shakespear by the Royal Shakespear company -- so I humor myself while being realistic about the progress I can make.

Hadriel 4y ago

tldr: "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."

npunt 4y ago

I organize my Obsidian around this concept, separating out different streams for different domains of content I'm interested in. Social, AI, Antilibrary, Wisdom, generic Inbox, and my own Passing Thoughts and Story Prompts. I treat each of these streams as an input to growing my understanding & thinking in these domains, much like a stream of water nourishes plants around it. It's a big unlock to do things this way, because it treats inputs as opportunities not tasks. Different streams flow at different rates based on where my initial interests lie and based on interesting things happening in the world. Sort of biomimicry in action in the intellectual realm

lawrenceyan 4y ago
I've been using Google Keep mostly, but tried Obsidian for a bit. Is it worth the transition?
- jotson 4y ago
  I switched from Keep to Obsidian as well. It depends on your goals. For me, I was saving things in Keep that I wanted to have forever and I don't trust Google to operate the service forever. The exported data is also not super portable. And there are things I want to save that I don't want on a cloud service. So I switched to Obsidian which gives me a simple and portable file format, privacy, and I trust myself to keep those files safe more than I trust Google.
- npunt 4y ago
  If all you need is a short term cache of ephemeral things that won't matter in a year, Google Keep is probably fine. If you want something that you invest in that stores thoughts and ideas that you want to go back to later, I'd use something far more reliable. I'd look at: * Whether the product is a revenue driver for the company * Whether the company has a history of good behavior * Whether the company seems like they care about their users & making a good product * Whether you have control over the data, including an open file format Personally I wouldn't touch Keep because none of the above apply.

nasir 4y ago

Just added this to my to read list!

switowski 4y ago

Sounds useful, I will read it later!

gspencley 4y ago

> After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library This article was clearly NOT written for me :(

karaterobot 4y ago

I have an English Lit degree, and the following advice from a professor almost made it worthwhile: "if you're reading for pleasure, and it's not pleasurable, put the book down. Give the author 50 pages, and if they haven't made it worth your time, move on to the next book." I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.

sacnoradhq 4y ago
Absolutely. "I must finish everything on my plate" mentality is unnecessary masochism. I recall plowing through ~2/3 of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and then losing interest. I picked up "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" today to be my new bathroom reader.
randomluck040 4y ago
Sunk cost fallacy is playing its part as well I think. I can’t bring myself to read anything I don’t like anymore. I’m a slow reader so working through a book takes its time and I want to get the best possible experience out of it. Won’t happen if I don’t like the book. It’s not only valid for books but everything else: series, movies, video games. If it doesn’t work, why push it?
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Some of it also comes from prior impressions that a book is "worth reading". Take Wealth of Nations as an example. It inspired, arguably, the whole field of economics - and yet after a hundred or so pages of reading about the worth of the labour of a man in Glasgow as compared to the labour of a man in London, I just wanted someone to end my misery. Alas, I'm afflicted by the "must finish" disease, so I paused reading and keep telling myself I'll get back to it.
  - meling 4y ago
    Same experience with that book; I started listening to the audiobook, but never finished it. Maybe someday.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

I need sandbags because the bookshelf dam is bursting through the overflow gates. No, really, I have stopped buying books because I've ran out of room. I guess I'm going to have to sell and give away some to make room for new ones. )':

candyman 4y ago

To give him credit I have to cite Dave Weiner who for me created the concept of of online information being a "river" which means you can watch it go by and not feel guilty about it. You pick out what you find interesting or important and let the rest go. I've never thought of "zero inbox" as something worth striving for. Just let it go...

dredmorbius 4y ago

First: there's a hell of a lot of wisdom about reading and how to approach it in Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book. That's a perennial favourite of both HN and myself. In particular it addresses the question of how to read different types of books and for different purposes. In detail. In particular, Adler repeatedly stresses the notion of reading as an inquiry, in the sense that you are asking questions of the book and the author. If those questions are rewarded, all the better. If they're not ... you might be better of spending time elsewhere. <https://archive.org/details/howtoreadbook0000adle_y9v4 https://archive.org/details/howtoreadbook0000adle_y9v4> I've referenced it nearly 30 times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22how%20to%20read%20a%20book%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> Disclaimer: I'm only about halfway through it myself, though the book is on my e-reader ;-) On filters, I disagree with Burkeman, it is filter failure, and Burkeman is himself failing to define what sorts of filters are needed. In the context of the "haystack-sized piles of needles", it's useful to consider the question how many needles do I need?, and to simply select a sufficient (and not excessive) number. This does presume that the stacks are of equivalent quality, which can pose a slight challenge, though factors such as reputation and some occasional broad sampling usually address this. In particular, though, in an environment with a surfeit of signals and records, what is needed are cheap, fast, no-regret rejection tools. I've noted this a few times in earlier comments, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795>. In the physical world, our senses and mental capabilities provide us with this: we're tuned to a limited set of stimuli (sight, sound, smell, taste, various touch, proprioception, and inner-state senses such as hunger, thirst, and need to void bowels or bladder). There's a heck of a lot of other signals the Universe provides, we are utterly blind to them for the most part, and our lack of capacity to sense these largely doesn't bother us. Even within our extant sense channels, we can only detect so much: visible light, but not radio or x-rays, the audible spectrum but not infra- or ultra-sonic frequencies, some smells with great sensitivity (petrichor, mercaptin) others not at all (water, carbon monoxide), etc. In the world of data one of the most effective and unbiased rejection methods is random sampling. We usually think of this in terms of data selected, but it could as readily be expressed as data rejected. The reason statisticians sample randomly is because measurement is expensive, and quite often a highly accurate impression of a phenomenon can be gathered from only a few tens or hundreds of individual examples if those themselves are selected without bias or are otherwise representative. For texts and readings, much depends on why you're reading something. If it's simply for entertainment, then the requisite question is "am I being entertained". If it's for information, then the question broadens, but I'd suggest: - Is this actually informative? Is it telling me something I don't already know (rather than reinforcing biases or existing beliefs)? Is it accurate? Is the information durable? - Is this useful? Can I use the information, and will it change a future action or decision of mine? Does it put the past in a more comprehensible light? - If a skill, is the skill taught useful and durable? I and many others have often noted that the base set of Unix / Linux shell tools and editors provides a highly useful and durable skillset, one I first began acquiring 30 to 40 years ago, and still use daily. I've seen many other technical skillsets, including expensive training or books (some at an employers' cost, some at my own), come and go over that same time. - How does this fit with an existing worldview or structure? I've begun specifically cultivating a few of my own ontologies and sense-making structures, and find that these provide useful lenses for assimilating and testing new information. Occasionally I'll find other authors have anticipated my own notions, and the force with which that realisation hits is profound. It's also a strong validation that I'm likely on a useful path, or at least one that others had previously found worth pursuing. All of these boil down to "Is this worth my time?" Note that most news, episodic broadcast media, and online content fares abysmally on the "durability" criterion. I don't ignore these entirely (and struggle immensely with online content), but am highly cognisant that these tend to be the equivalents of fast food. As an occasional treat or spice ... not necessarily bad. But if these are your primary fare ... reconsider your priorities, environment, and patterns. A practice I'm finding useful is to at least periodically consider what has be "BOTI" --- best of the interval. On some basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly), I'll try to cast back over what I've read, heard, or viewed, and consider what's been the most insightful or useful. For the past decade, that title's gone to an Aeon piece by Michael Schulson, "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly", on the value of sortition: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. And yes, that relates to my comments above on random sampling / exclusion rather neatly. As for the first time I realised that there was in fact far more information than I could reasonably access, it was at a library. On entering uni, I remember my first visit to the main campus library, literally a tower of books, holding several million volumes (and part of an even larger collection across other libraries both on campus and at other campuses). What I did instead was to treat the collection as a resource, something to ask questions of, with a few (small) sections explored in detail, many others skipped entirely, and some sampled from selectively. A particular memory was of seeing the film The Last Emperor, a biography of Puyi, the last emperor of China, and largely a Japanese puppet. One scene of the film featured a Time Magazine photographer, and the thought occurred that there was probably a story from that time. I tracked this down and read the story, published in the 1930s, from a copy dating to that time. The experience of "oh, I can track that down" has stuck with me. And yes, losing on-campus access to academic stacks was an absolutely wrenching experience for me, moderated now through the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Library Genesis, ZLibrary, and other resources. And yes, if something's not worth reading, it's not worth reading, as noted in an exchange I had on HN itself over the past day or so.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

GPT3 Summary: The article discusses the issue of having too many things to read, listen to, or watch, and how it can be overwhelming. The author argues that the problem is not a lack of filtering technology, but rather too much information that we actually care about. They suggest that instead of trying to reduce the size of the to-read/listen/watch pile, we should treat it like a river, and pick a few choice items from it, rather than trying to empty the whole pile. The article also emphasizes the need to make tough choices about what matters most in life, and accept that we cannot do everything.

adultSwim 4y ago

This book sounds good. I'll add it to the list.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throwaway9980 4y ago

Hacker News is my river.

examplary_cable 4y ago

As a loyal cultist, I'll drop here one of the most transformative "educational" or reading technique I have even encoutered: Incremental Reading[0]. I would recommend it to anyone to give it a try, it absolutely changed how I study. [0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading

ramraj07 4y ago
Things like this might work for a small fraction of people for whom structure is in and of itself part of the pleasure. For unorganized quacks like me doing all of these “techniques” just ends up being a chore and takes the fun out already mundane things.

everydayentropy 4y ago

If it takes writers as long as this article's author to get to the point, no wonder we have reading buckets/backlogs/rivers/whatever. People optimize for search engines, not brevity and therein lies the problem. Be concise and communicate your idea. That should be the North Star of writers.

jakkos 4y ago

bookmark

prepend 4y ago

I think in this analogy, I am the river and books to read are rocks along the bed. I flow over all the rocks and glean some information worn off the rocks. So I can work on selecting what kind of rocks go into my path that I flow over.

hekec 4y ago

I developed a simple read-later app called Readstack to tackle this problem. The idea is that it forces you to go through pages one-by-one, without postponing. So, if you want to read something, you will have one item on the top of the list, and you need to read it or remove it before you can go to the following items. It helped me reduce my read-later pule to zero. You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/readstack-read-later/id1558413561?l=en https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/readstack-read-later/id1558413...