The Subtle Art of Drawing the Line
I’m done with this stuff!
For as long as I can remember I’ve been religiously collecting bookmarks (the how to’s, life hacking, personal growth, name whatever you can think of) thinking that there will come a day when they will come in handy. To make things even more fun, I didn’t even bother reading the contents from start to end, learning something from the article right then & there. No, I would come across an interesting topic, skim through and bookmark it for later when I thought I will have the time to go though it thoroughly and maybe even apply the newly learned skills with the objective of improving my life one way or another.
And this happened with everything including recipes, workout plans, travel destinations, you name it, sometimes even with books. I bought books because I came across the title in some random “this summer read these books so you won’t feel stupid” and then just placed it nicely on the shelf, thinking that buying it is just as good as reading it. After all, there it is, standing proudly on my bookshelf, as if when girls come over and see it I can proudly say “it’s on my to do list” — like that will score me any points.
Information overload
It doesn’t take a genius to realize the consequence of this habit. Of course that my bookmarks library continued to grow to a point where classifying the information became cumbersome. Luckily I think there are many more like me out there because otherwise I don’t understand why someone would go through the effort of building “Pocket” if he didn’t have the same problem to fix. So now I have multiple platforms to save my “stuff”. “I need an algorithm”, I thought to myself, where to save what. So I came up with a selection process where stuff that I thought was really important — such as life lessons, definition of happiness, etc. went to the Pocket, while the rest, cluttered continuously in my Safari bookmarks folder (ahm, folders, neatly structured and nested). The guys at Pocket realised that in their quest of bringing structure to my reading materials, they had to introduce tags because otherwise what good is their platform if it doesn’t solve the problem they starting off solving in the first place? Welcome “tags”.
By this point I think it is more then obvious that I, we, suffer from an information overload. There is so much content available to us that is impossible to cover and we should be happy and thankful if we manage to just scratch the surface.
There isn’t such a thing as knowing too much.
Too much information is as useless as too little. As seen from my “collectors problem”, keep adding more stuff doesn’t cut it. You will find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of information available and I can tell you right now that, you won’t get the chance to cover it all. In the words of Steve Jobs — “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are”. The trick is to figure out when enough is enough, make a decision and cut out the rest. Don’t second-guess your decision.
The trick is to figure out when enough is enough, make a decision, move on and hope for the best.
Stop making plans; Start making decisions!
Finally, you might ask why this was worth writing about. Well, of course I wrote it for you, but also for me. I wrote it because I also recently realized that life is too short to keep postponing things for later. The clock is ticking and keep adding stuff to the “for later to-do list” is like saying that I will do something else now and I will start living my life later. That stops now.
I deleted by Safari bookmarks collection, as painful as it was, it had to go. No reason to dwell on it anymore. I’ve also spring cleaned my Pocket “collectibles” and I decided to go through my library of “trophy” books waiting on the shelf before I purchase any new ones.
Hope you enjoyed the read!
p.s. What actions will you take?
