1: It feels like we are swimming in a sea of information.
“It’s become a ubiquitous modern problem to have not only a teetering pile of books we’ve been meaning to read, but a digital stack of articles we’d like to digest, plus a long queue of podcast episodes to listen to, videos or TV shows to watch, or videogames we’ve purchased and would love to play, if only we could find the time,”  Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
We certainly don’t lack recommendations for things to read, listen to, or watch.
“Technologies such as Amazon’s recommendation engine are an excellent way to discover things to read,” Oliver observes, “while social media, at its best, is like having thousands of unpaid assistants scouring the globe for content you’re likely to find particularly fascinating.”
We’ve come a long way from trying to find a needle of helpful information in the haystack. Our challenge today is dealing with “haystack-sized piles of needles,” writes technology critic Nicolas Carr.
2: To combat this sense of overwhelm, our initial response may be to look for strategies to be more efficient. Perhaps we can consume things more quickly.
What if we use the “trim silence” feature on our podcast app? Or listen to audiobooks on double speed?
[Oliver writes: “Recall Woody Allen’s line about taking a speed-reading course, then tackling War and Peace: ‘It’s about Russia.'”]
“But there’s far too much content for that,” Oliver suggests. “Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets us to the end of it. Because we’re processing more of it, faster, and without ever achieving the satisfaction of reducing it, we’re just left feeling more scattered and stressed.”
3: Fortunately, Oliver has three helpful suggestions for navigating our world of infinite information.
Strategy one: “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket,” he writes. “That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”
Strategy two: Embrace the fact that our goal is not to stockpile knowledge. “Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts we insert into our brains,” Oliver observes, “but from the ways in which reading changes us, by shaping our sensibilities, for which good work and good ideas will later flow.”
“Every book makes a mark,” says the art consultant Katrina Janoskova, “even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.”
Strategy three: “Remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else,” he suggests. “Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who we become in the future – though it might do that too–but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.”
Right on! More next week!
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Reflection: Am I selecting what I read and consume with intention, or am I letting the endless stream of information dictate my attention?
Action: Choose one article, book, or podcast this week to enjoy fully—and let the rest flow by without guilt.
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