Do you, like me, have an ever-growing backlog of things to read? If so, then I’d like to pass along some advice I recently came across.
Each day, I add more articles, essays, books, and newsletters to an already long list of things to read. Will I ever get to it all? No. But do I think I will? Absolutely. That’s why I was relieved to find some advice in Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Here’s what he wrote:
1. “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.”
It would be impossible to read everything, so why try? Instead, read what you can and let everything else float away.
“That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”
2. “Resist the urge to stockpile knowledge.”
It’s OK if you don’t take copious notes or return to every dogeared page. Just read it and you’ll benefit.
“Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark, says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’”
3. “Consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.”
Read what you want to read.
“So you needn’t always choose to read what’s most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future—though it might do that too—but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.”
Thanks for reading. (Or not—that’s fine, too).
Eric