…you let the stack of “things to read” pile up, then eventually when the pile gets to high you end up tossing half of it–or worse, moving it to a deeper “stuff to read someday” stack.
This is (was?) exactly me. Just me with my bookmarks, articles, posts… I have tons of stacks. Tons of books to read. Movies to watch or simply stuff to do (but this is another story).
Creating passionate users has a really nice article about the myth of “keeping up”.
Some of the hints given in the article are:
- Find the best aggregators.
- Get summaries.
- Cut the redundancy!
- Unsubscribe to as many things as possible.
- Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes.
- Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest.
- Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
- In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is: Need to know, Should know, Nice to know, Edge case (only if it applies to you specifically), Useless.
The article also covers a little part about the overwhelming documentation we have to deal with sometimes: if we could learn to better communicate, we could alleviate the “keeping up anxiety”… at least saving time to readers.
There’s an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload / pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).
In the meantime, take a deep breath and repeat after me, “I will never keep up. Keeping up is a myth.” And if it makes you feel any better, add, “John isn’t keeping up either.”