I understand what you’re trying to do with this comment, but arguably the river in this case is HN.
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.
I think many people are struggling with the same issues independently, all across society. This is equally true right now as it is in other times.
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.
You the reader should only read the second last paragraph, which I copied here for your convenience:
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.
Eliminate the waste in your 'to read' pile by populating it the same way he suggests selecting from it - pluck a few choice items here and there from the river that is the British Library.
I asked GPT4 to summarize the article's most important information into bullet points, which I find more useful than one paragraph summaries:
> 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.
I think most people end up doing what he's suggesting anyway, out of necessity. I suppose his key insight is to just stop feeling guilty about not being able to get through it all.
In my younger years I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Economist. Both full of interesting stuff, but a torrent. I had to unsubscribe as I kept on thinking, I'll finish that one later, but never did before the next one arrived. Great magazines for a flight, where time seems boundless, and you were connection-less, before the internet found its way onto airplanes.
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.
The New Yorker is great when you have the time. It seems like the Economist has really trimmed the article length over the years though, probably in response to web analytics.
I think the new AI tools are going to help me a great deal. There are books that I know I’m not going to read but I’d still like the Cliffs Notes distillation. I think an AI that understands my areas of interest could create personalized summaries of those books.
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…)
I can’t help but think their time is running out. AIs are going to be able to produce the book summary and maybe even generate the audio version of that too.
I have not, because I actually prefer to read the full book, even if my Tsundoku keeps growing. Another way that I look at it is that even if I compressed my unread books into summaries, I would then just get more and more summaries, ending up with the same problem.
I recommended it to you because it sounds like you really want to read the books you have or are accumulating, so you might find it valuable, even if I don't.
I prefer to read the full book as well, I just know that there are certain books for which that will never happen. For example, I would love to have already read one of those 4” thick biographies of Winston Churchill but I have almost no desire to start reading one of them.
I did and haven't found it that useful after all. Turns out that after you subscribe, it's hard to find the motivation to get through many of those condensed versions.
I tried blinkist, I liked it in theory but I realized that I only listened to the summaries while busy with other things so I wasn’t really absorbing the information.
One way I've been managing this is by reading summaries of certain books. While it can be difficult to decide which books deserve a full read, this approach has significantly reduced the stress I feel about my ever-growing "to-read" pile. By focusing on the most important ideas and insights, I can still learn and grow without feeling the pressure to read every single book on my list.
Careful with this. You have to trust that the summary is correct. Which, as it turns out, isn't as foolproof as one might hope for.
It turns out that a sizeable percentage of human reviewers and condensers of information just make stuff up. And if you're just consuming the summary of a work, how would you know?
Something that helped me was to develop my "discernment" of "quality" so I could quickly reject material that appeared interesting but actually was of little use to me. This is going to be different for each person, but I think it's worth putting some thought into because I had previously assumed I had developed a natural talent for it when actually I was consuming content out of habit.
That could never work for me personally. A book isn't something that's uniform in quality or engagement throughout, in fact they're often predictably lopsided where the the first few pages are getting you familiar with the characters and setting. I also have to know the ending to even begin to think about the book as a whole. Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
Authors pay a lot of attention to the first few pages of their books, and try to expose the best aspects of their writing style there in order to hook you in. I try to remain conscious of this as I read in order to better anticipate the style and content curation that follows.
> I don't regret the time spent finishing them
I think this is a different take than many others would have on the topic of reading. I know I regret spending time reading things that do not "spark joy", to put it pithily.
For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the unrepresentative intro portion—I appreciate a punchy and/or gripping opening scene, but it's not very well correlated to how much I'll enjoy the rest of the text.
It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)
>Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.
I thought the authors of the Expanse[0] series did a pretty good job with that. AFAICT (but I have no way to confirm this), they split the storytelling so that each plot arc is consistent and speaks with a single voice.
I can certainly see how multiple authors could muddle the "voice", but I think the quality (or otherwise) is more a function of storyboarding/universe creation and how well that's done collectively by the authors.
Please note I'm not really disagreeing with you and, as a rule, your observation jibes with mine. Although (as I mentioned) there are some exceptions.
There's a wide range of emotions and impact I expect from good writing - joy is nice, but hardly required for me. A couple of my favorites I've read several times like East of Eden or Brothers Karamazov end up being more like fundamental changes to who I am rather just experiences of emotion, neither being very joyous.
>Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
I agree. I read a lot of books too, and I've only given up on a few. Mostly I don't remember what they were (after all, I disliked them enough not to finish them), but BattleField Earth[0] comes to mind. Gosh, what an awful read. Never did finish that one. Ugh.
Other than those few, I'm not sad I finished any of the books I wasn't that into.[1]
Very much agree, no shame in dropping a work you started if it isn't as good as it seemed. Also skipping ahead in books and skimming articles can help.
I’m the developer of an iOS and iPadOS app that I think is relevant here. My app Ephemera is a simple read-later application that places expiration dates on every link you add. If you don’t read the article in time, it disappears forever.
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.
As you probably guessed, Snapchat doesn't really get deleted. I sat as a juror on a case where some of the most damning evidence was a Snapchat the police obtained from the company following an armed robbery and car theft. Some people are really poor at planning and covering their tracks.
I actually solved this without an app. I realized I had around 10k "read later" items in my bookmarks folder in Chrome, and I simply deleted all of them.
I think it's more that you always have a bunch of other things competing for your attention on the internet so there's no incentive to read things you once wanted to read.
Even an article you just opened in a tab competes with scavenging for more info on HN/Reddit/Twitter. I don't think that's evidence that the articles are just worthless.
Once, when the internet was out for a few days, I realized that iOS saves your reading list items for offline reading and I was glad to have it. All sorts of interesting articles that I curated. I now work through the reading queue on flights.
I solved this by forcing myself to read my list in chronological order. After a small period it became very obvious that most stuff I'd put in my list truly did not matter.
Nice idea. I use Readwise in the river/shortlist mode and have a similar filter (not in shortlist, saved > x days ago), but I have to manually clear it out.
Awesome! I do this with my YouTube Watch Later playlist and it really works. I'll get a couple hundred videos I "definitely want to watch, but not now" and my script will clear them out after X time. Never once have I missed something it's deleted. I don't even know _what_ it's deleted, because if it stood out enough to remember the name and search it up again I'll probably just watch it. Very few things do.
* Somehow, App Store SEO can't find it with "ephemera". "ephemera deadpan" found it though
* For me, personally, bookmarking is usually done on the computer and read elsewhere. Phone-only is restrictive
* Not a fan of paid unlock for basic features (setting expiration dates, accessing my own history (?!?)). I almost understand notifications if server costs are involved, like Apollo, but. While I understand devs gotta make a buck and this is both popular and well within your rights, I am not a fan of this trend
Sure! It's utter garbage but you're welcome to it. I keep it in a notes file and paste it into the console to run it.
It sorts by `Date Added (newest)` and truncates the list to the 150 most recent videos. It also removes anything I've watched more than ~80% of. (Because the built-in button removes videos if you've watched _any_ percent, incl long ones you haven't finished yet)
I'd love something similar with more general aspect, just TODO list with different priorities, expiration etc. Whether the content is URL, name of the book or grocery list are just implementation details.
Is there a way to have unread items go in an archive instead of disappearing? Sometimes I find insightful to re-look at the titles of things I've saved, even if I don't read them. It brings me back the why I saved it and it always unlocks some thought.
Love the idea. I use Signal's Note to Self feature with a 4 week timer. Anything that warrants an extension gets readded to the queue. A dedicated app with a custom expiration / reminders / notifications / cross-device syncing would be phenomenal!
As someone wanting to read lots of books and articles, this really resonates with me. Not having to read everything but picking and choosing a few here and there
My local library has a limit of having 100 books on hold (which I hit during 2020 lockdowns when there were closed for a while). My current hold list is ~60, and the system allows you to put 'pause' a hold until a certain day so that they don't all arrive at once: so I have holds going out to July.
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.)
I had read some books on kindle here and there over the years,but recently switched over to full time on the kindle. And I must say, there is a distinct pleasure in carrying multiple books with me, and switching between them at will. I have been trying to replace bouncing around apps on my phone with bouncing around books on my kindle and it's been very enjoyable. Reduces pressure to finish any single book, and a lot more freedom to bounce around!
I enjoyed reading this, but was left with the same feeling that i had at the end of the 1983 film WarGames, namely: "...the only winning move is not to play..." I acknowledge this post is not exactly saying that...but it still feels a little flattening to arrive at that point. (With all apologies and respect to the author, i'm referring to my feelings on the suggestions, that's all.)
I agree with your summary but to me it seems like a useful point of insight. Analogous to the saying "when you find yourself in a hole that's getting deeper the first thing to do is stop digging". Something that seems like common sense but is hard to grasp when you're in the hole, unless someone explicitly points it out.
One might also decide that this article is wrong, but it could still be worth considering the point to reject it.
I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list.
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.
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!
A strength of a product, particularly where emotion and motivation are concerned, is guidance and encouragement - making it easy to do. Even if you "could" do it without help.
Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
> I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
Yeah I compartmentalize exceptions like these as well. Like I don't count "ongoing coop games with friends" or "long term games" (like your Factorio save, or something like League of Legends) towards my broader "What I'm currently playing" count.
I've got the same issue, particularly with PlayStation Plus, where there are countless games available at minimal cost.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
> I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
I made a drastic improvement in my mindset with regards to media backlogs when I realized that they they exist to entertain me and that my whims are the only thing that matters. I don’t owe that pile of books anything. Now they’re not allowed to generate stress, only entertainment!
I think people feel forced to get the value they put in back out of every single one of them asap as to not feel like they wasted their money which is what is causing that stress to begin with, even though there really isn't any reason for that urge if you look at it. The backlog is going to be there practically forever, just waiting - granted it's not tied to a service which might shut down at any moment.
That's why libraries (or, shall we say, digital libraries) are great, I don't have to worry about running out of media or feel like I need to get value from them.
It hasn't been updated in a while but I have used this games list before. (https://github.com/Elbriga14/EveryVideoGameEver)
IGDB sounds incredible though, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious if you use How Long to Beat to get the completion time. I've used completion time to produce some helpful metrics.
Yes I use How Long To Beat! I was amazed to see it’s so popular it’s even integrated into IGN’s page for games.
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
Ha, are you me? I've got an extremely similar setup.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game
2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play.
3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
For me, it's much more rewarding to find those "needles" and add them to my reading list -- than to actually read them. I.e. the dopamine hit of finding something new/interesting -- that's the thrill.
I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?
How many of them has already rot? I've found that 70% of ten-year-ago bookmarks of mine do not exist anymore, especially if it was a weblog or a youtube video.
I asked ChatGPT: The article discusses the problem of having too much information and too many choices, which can be overwhelming and lead to a feeling of not being able to accomplish everything. The author suggests that the solution is not to try to filter or prioritize better, but to accept that there will always be more to do than can be done and to make choices based on what is most important at the moment. The author also suggests treating the "to-read" pile like a river, picking and choosing what to read as it flows by rather than feeling the need to read everything.
I agree with the concept, but I tend to view my to-read pile more like a sushi conveyor than a river. Assuming I'm still interested later in what I have to read, then it can come round again.
That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
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.
> an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
But it needs to be said and repeated, right?
Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.
And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.
You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.
The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.
As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.
Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.
I think LLMs could definitely help us stop treating large piles as "lists" (to be completed). You can just "dialogue" with it through Chat. And if the AI has access to your recent activities or notes, it can even give you relevant choices. Or you can "navigate" through it in an interactive 2D/3D map that clusters the article/books by (semantic) similarity.
So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.
Yes, more opaque and unpredictable for sure, but I don’t think it deepens the problems of curation. I believe it is solution. : you trade predictability/transparency for smarter /non-linear curation. You can always choose.
> 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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadEdit: I get now. '...a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a choice item...'
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.
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.
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.
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…)
I can’t help but think their time is running out. AIs are going to be able to produce the book summary and maybe even generate the audio version of that too.
I recommended it to you because it sounds like you really want to read the books you have or are accumulating, so you might find it valuable, even if I don't.
Submit you favorite books to ChatGPT, ask for 10 keywords that describe the book.
Then ask for the keywords that repeat more than once and put those keywords into TheStoryGraph.
With this workflow you avoid "hallucinated" books. And thanks to this the worst suggestions are 4/5 stars.
Careful with this. You have to trust that the summary is correct. Which, as it turns out, isn't as foolproof as one might hope for.
It turns out that a sizeable percentage of human reviewers and condensers of information just make stuff up. And if you're just consuming the summary of a work, how would you know?
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 don't regret the time spent finishing them
I think this is a different take than many others would have on the topic of reading. I know I regret spending time reading things that do not "spark joy", to put it pithily.
It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)
I thought the authors of the Expanse[0] series did a pretty good job with that. AFAICT (but I have no way to confirm this), they split the storytelling so that each plot arc is consistent and speaks with a single voice.
I can certainly see how multiple authors could muddle the "voice", but I think the quality (or otherwise) is more a function of storyboarding/universe creation and how well that's done collectively by the authors.
Please note I'm not really disagreeing with you and, as a rule, your observation jibes with mine. Although (as I mentioned) there are some exceptions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
I agree. I read a lot of books too, and I've only given up on a few. Mostly I don't remember what they were (after all, I disliked them enough not to finish them), but BattleField Earth[0] comes to mind. Gosh, what an awful read. Never did finish that one. Ugh.
Other than those few, I'm not sad I finished any of the books I wasn't that into.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_Earth_(novel)
[1] N.B.: I'm referring to fiction exclusively here.
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!
Even an article you just opened in a tab competes with scavenging for more info on HN/Reddit/Twitter. I don't think that's evidence that the articles are just worthless.
Once, when the internet was out for a few days, I realized that iOS saves your reading list items for offline reading and I was glad to have it. All sorts of interesting articles that I curated. I now work through the reading queue on flights.
* Somehow, App Store SEO can't find it with "ephemera". "ephemera deadpan" found it though
* For me, personally, bookmarking is usually done on the computer and read elsewhere. Phone-only is restrictive
* Not a fan of paid unlock for basic features (setting expiration dates, accessing my own history (?!?)). I almost understand notifications if server costs are involved, like Apollo, but. While I understand devs gotta make a buck and this is both popular and well within your rights, I am not a fan of this trend
It sorts by `Date Added (newest)` and truncates the list to the 150 most recent videos. It also removes anything I've watched more than ~80% of. (Because the built-in button removes videos if you've watched _any_ percent, incl long ones you haven't finished yet)
Script here: https://pastebin.com/Sfh6a0w1
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.
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.)
One might also decide that this article is wrong, but it could still be worth considering the point to reject it.
here that would mean releasing things, and fully enjoying whatever it is you are able to read/participate in. mainly not grasping at everything
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!
Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game 2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play. 3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
Here's my completed games list: https://airtable.com/shrJvjcnh0psf3ha6/tblF5D5k2qMuzrao8
I've got similar setups for books, movies, and TV shows. They're all linked on my site: https://xavd.id/#my-media-lists
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?
Just save the link for later reading[0].
[0] And who knows, you might even read it.
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.
But it needs to be said and repeated, right?
Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.
And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.
You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.
The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.
As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
And yet you added even more with your comment :)
People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.
Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.
So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.
> 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.