a question that has come up a lot in my one one one sessions lately is how to get through all the reading. and how to make choices about what to read at what time. even more acutely, i’ve come to realize the pressure that having a "to read" pile at all can present.
there are two ways to approach a problem like "i have too much to read":
filter out the list to determine the best things to read
rearrange whatever you need to to just.....read it all, even if it increases as you keep going
and a lot of my own advice in this community is about the first suggestion - how to find and identify the most important things to read. and so we do that, and we reduce the pile a little bit, but what happens when everything there will probably be useful and you still can't read it all? but then i came across this blog post by oliver burkeman (of a very good, if a little heavy, productivity book called four thousand weeks) and this passage really resonated:
Unfortunately, most advice on productivity and time management takes the needle-in-a-haystack approach instead. It's about becoming more efficient and organised, or better at prioritising, with the implied promise that you might thereby eliminate or disregard enough of life's unimportant nonsense to make time for the meaningful stuff. To stretch a metaphor: it's about reducing the size of the haystack, to make it easier to focus on the needle.
There's definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it's insoluble – that you definitely won't be fitting everything in. (Of course some such problems, where just scraping a living feels impossible, demand political solutions too – a topic for another time.) It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your "big rocks", but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you'll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.
his reframe for this problem of "too many needles" (too many things, all important) is to think about 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)."
so many of us treat a LOT of things in academia (and life) like items in a bucket - we pick up articles and projects and tasks and ideas and put them in our bucket and then set about working very hard to make them all reality (empty the bucket). so instead of clearing our to read tags, the river approach suggests that we instead think about reading what feels most important, at the time, with the information we have. and then if the information changes, and we need to read something else, we do. you can apply this to projects in your pipeline, ideas for your chapter in your idea notebook, or even all the tasks you feel like you could or should be doing day to day. the goal is not to do all of them, and feel the ever mounting pressure when we can't because we cannot control time or space. the goal is to choose with the best information we have in the present, and not take on the guilt that comes with not being able to do everything - a genuinely impossible task.