The zen of firehose drinking
So in the last few days, I've read two blog posts lamenting symptoms of information overload, one about a backlog of aggregator items and another about unread mailing list threads. The common thread I've seen between both of these--and other bloggers expressing similar sentiments--is a vague sort of guilt over "missing something".
However, before we had access to syndication feeds or high-traffic mailing lists, we were missing all kinds of good stuff already. It's just been in the past decade or so that personal information aggregation tech has gotten to a point where we're now aware of the dull roar of Things Being Missed.
Fact is, though, that you can't catch everything. At least not and have a human life left over--and even then, you only have so much raw mental capacity to catch it. No, the best thing to do is to relax, accept that you're only able to lap from the stream as it goes by, and be happy that there's a stream to lap from where there was none before.
Aggregate, prioritize, peruse, and discard with abandon. This is continuous partial attention at work.
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