One Way to Manage Your “To Read” Pile
I’ve been thinking about Oliver Burkeman’s advice for avoiding information overload: treat your "to read" pile like a river rather than a bucket.
A river flows past you; you can dip in wherever your curiosity takes you. A bucket, on the other hand, fills up and eventually overflows, demanding to be emptied.
I store the articles I want to read and videos I want to watch in Readwise Reader.
Every Sunday, I spend some time in Reader, choosing whatever feels interesting. Once I’ve read or watched something, I archive it so it’s saved but no longer visible.
The result is that I never expect to reach "inbox zero" with my reading pile, and that’s fine. It feels like a gentler way of managing my content consumption and energy. Readwise Reader feels like a river to me, not a bucket.
Books feel trickier, perhaps because I’ve paid for them and they take more time. I don’t force myself to finish books I’m not enjoying, though there’s still a little guilt attached to putting them aside. When I am not listening to audiobooks, I read exclusively on Kindle and usually have a few on the go. I remove books once I’ve finished or paused them. It started as a space-saving measure, but now it’s just a habit.
I’m beginning to wonder whether leaving books on my Kindle might help me treat them more like a river; always there, waiting for me to dip in and out, without pressure.
Of course, some people prefer not to save things at all; they just read or watch in the moment. Maybe the real trick is finding the approach that feels least like a bucket and most like a river.
I am curious to hear about how you manage your reading pile.
