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Comment by pvinis | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions for solving or improving on this?

I used to have a humble bundle subscription and every month I got like 5 games on Steam, and played around 2 per year. My solution for this one was to unsubscribe. Yes, I still see it every now and then and think "Oh would be cool to play this" but then I remind myself that I would have no time for it.

Another case is started projects or just ideas that never get realized. But no solution for this. I know I should "just start" and finish small increments etc, but it doesn't seem to be enough to motivate me, even though I think my ideas would make for some great useful apps/scripts.

What suggestions does HN have?

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For games I just stopped buying anything that I didn't intend to play instantly.

And I do mean instantly. As soon as I get it, I start playing.

If I don't plan to do that, I don't buy the game until I do.

I now ignore sales completely, and only buy games when I want to play them.

This, surprisingly, actually lowered my game expenditure. But I was getting into the low 200s in my steam library, and I think I have only run around 30 of those at least once, so it was all really wasteful.

I roughly adapted the same thing to books, I don't buy a new book until I'm done reading my current book, or decided to drop the book I'm reading.

EDIT: Let me be clear: While I say instantly there's some flexibility. I may order a game on Amazon Wednesday, get it on Thursday, and start playing on the weekend. I think instantly may have been the wrong word. More like immediate/nearest in time.

This is my exact policy as well, for steam games and also now board games which are wildly harder to play (logistically)

After the recent steam summer sale where I bought nothing I felt like I had been handed the one ring and passed the test

Is it really a problem to be solved? As the article mentions, there's no negative association with the word tsundoku in Japan. It seems like having a reserve of reading material is a good thing; you'll always have something new to read and learn when you * do * have unexpectedly free time. The material will be pre-filtered to subjects you care about and it will be close at hand, minimizing the friction of using those random gaps.

I guess one downside is queue prioritization and management, but maybe the piling gives you an opportunity to test the strength of your interest in a subject relative to other items in your queue.

Well, some of us see an early sign of hoarding in people who stockpile books.

Even if someone has the means to grow a large library without interfering in their day to day living, I think there is something sad about large, private libraries and collections where books sit untouched. I compare them to books in a bustling university or community library and think what a shame it is for those resources to waste away like that.

My wife and I still haul around some books we acquired during university, which feel like equal part sentimentality and obligation. But, we've re-taken to using our nearby libraries to borrow books, read them, and return them to the stream.

When I buy books these days, I read them and then usually set them free somewhere, whether a miniature lend-borrow shelf at work or just loaning them out to anybody I know who might be interested. I don't loan them with an expectation to see them again, but the hope they will get passed along and well used.

I'm reading mostly on Kindle. So when I'm interested in a book, I don't buy it right away, I "send a free sample" to my Kindle. This way I at least save money. And the pile of samples in my Kindle serves as a to-read list. I only buy a book I fully read the sample and still want to read it.

One of the downsides of piling unread books for me is that later when I return to a book I feel like it's "old news". I have better chances to read a book when I first encounter it.

Similar to that, I had a bad habit of buying whole series at a time, before the kindle era, because you never knew once a series would grip you how fast you'd want to read it all quickly or vice versa where you might want days/months between volumes to palate cleanse. The kindle makes it so easy now at the end of a book to buy the next book in the series that I try to only buy one book at a time in a series, only buying the next when I'm ready to start it.

For videogames:

1. Blanket ban on anything "unreleased" - alpha, beta, early access, pre-order etc.

2. Stop buying bundles and packs.

3. Stop buying "good old games". Yes, I get it, there are approximately a thousand more incredible classic games that I really need to play, but unfortunately I don't have much time for that. Or limit classics to 1 per year.

For books:

1. Stop buying anything in bad editions - paperbacks, paper similar to toilet paper etc.

2. Stop buying "one off" books, e.g. big series of fiction, detectives or whatever.

3. Limit yourself to very good or rare editions, books where illustrations matter etc.

I have same issues, books simply don't fit on the shelves, even in two rows, Steam library backlog is way too big and I still tend to buy stuff on impulse, but more restrained now due to above rules.

I'm into physical books and as a result of that I have a rather large bookcase in my living room. The books are sort of ordered by type (literature, foreign literature, non-fiction, etc), with some space in between. 'Unread books' is a separate type.

Whenever I feel the urge to buy something new, I check the physical space the unread books take up on the shelf. If they extend beyond a totally arbitrary limit that I set for myself, then I have to wait and read some of them first. Works very well for me.

I've also been guilty of this. For programming side projects, I recently decided I was going to think of them as microservices. I've been guilty of overengineering what should have been something simple and losing interest halfway through.

Instead of a polished, user-friendly product, I'm building simple utilities (CLI or minimal UI) that can be leveraged (or refactored) into something else in the future. Good documentation also helps!

I would like to hear suggestions as well. Most projects start off with a core idea I think everyone will love but when I start implementing I get the feeling that no one will use/see this and lose interest. The only projects I finish are for myself.

> then I remind myself that I would have no time for it

The best (worst) is when you actually have time, but instead of playing all this stuff from humble bundles and sales, you just keep playing Overwatch…

> The best (worst) is when you actually have time, but instead of playing all this stuff from humble bundles and sales, you just keep playing Overwatch…

Or like me where your backlog is so big that when you have time and motivation to play games you lose that motivation as you go through your library trying to decide what to actually play.

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