You the reader, should treat this article like a river and read only the second last paragraph.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Edit: I get now. '...a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a choice item...'