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

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.

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/

I’d love for Hacker News to check it out!

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...

Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (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!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?

> 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.

You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/readstack-read-later/id1558413...

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.

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

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. )':

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…)

So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.

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.

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

I would recommend it to anyone to give it a try, it absolutely changed how I study.

[0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading

This article was clearly NOT written for me :(

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.

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.

So I can work on selecting what kind of rocks go into my path that I flow over.

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.

<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&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> and <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-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.

Watching documentary about original story, and a few pieces about 19 century whale hunting, is much better use of time!