Kaushik's Blog

I give you permission to delete it from your list

Sometimes it gets kinda overwhelming. There's too many articles. Tutorials. Podcasts. Books. Videos longer than 45 seconds.

Everyone has a recommendation. And we're inclined to be receptive to more recommendations than we could ever possibly act upon.

This leads to overflows of everything. Read-it-later apps like Pocket teeming with unread articles, most of which I just don't feel like reading right now. My podcast player has a playlist with 67 hours' worth of content. Browser tabs on my phone - so many that the counter turns into a smiley face that's seems just a bit too snarky. What are you smiling about? It's not that many tabs.

On the other hand, my laptop has zero tabs. It's clean. So long as our agreed-upon definition of clean is to stuff all the junk into a dark closet, the digital manifestation of which is the OneTab extension.

This hoarding mentality can be demotivating. It has baked into it a delusion that there will be an eventual, elusive, magical time when I will be free to guzzle down all of these fire hoses of content and be contented.

I don't do as good a job as I should of keeping this idea in mind - treating all of this stuff as rivers, not buckets (source). And certainly not as fire hoses.

All those articles and tutorials aren't a to-do list to get through or a bucket to empty. They're more of a river, flowing by. Pick whatever interests you now. There's more river later, with more options, meant for the you that steps in it then.

After all, you never step in the same river twice. You've changed, and so has the water. The podcasts saved several months ago may no longer seem interesting.

If you need to hear this, as I need to hear myself saying this - whatever it is, I give you permission to delete it from your list. If it really does matter, you'll come across it again. The river of the internet, with its twists and turns, will bring it back past you sometime.