I admit it - I’m a hoarder. A digital hoarder. I have more books in my kindle library than I’m likely to ever read, more articles saved in Reader than you’d need to fill a decade’s worth of newspapers. I like it. I like having stuff there in case I need it and ohhhhh surely I will need those 10 articles about why BigTechCorp is so right/wrong with the latest new product, societal issue or anything else. I’ve got research papers about how LLMs work that felt important but I’m pretty sure they’ll always stay somewhere lower down the list.
In any case, I’m trying to take a more manageable approach to this amorphous blob of content and hopefully that’ll leave me more content too.
The gardening metaphor for gently pruning one’s tree of knowledge is not a new one but it helped me reframe. I’ll try not to race down to “inbox zero” only to fill up on another hundred articles, snips, ebooks, tweets.
I’ll instead try to be choosier and spend more time and presence with what I do read and be happy to leave the rest sitting there unspoilt. Maybe I’ll even read it one day.