Slow Drowning in the Flood of the Growing Reading List

Hard Work or Hard Cut?

I know the problem. I got it myself. Whenever I’m hanging out on Medium, I see a lot of interesting articles that I “could” read, but I just don’t have the motivation for it right now. What am I doing? Because I don’t want to miss the best tip I could ever find in an article. Right! I just press this great bookmark icon. And the article is already stored in my reading list.

But the tricky thing about it is that I always do this. Each time I save up to 10 posts, but when I read maybe only 3 or 4 articles. What’s happening? Exactly, my list is getting longer and longer and every time I see the number of articles I still have to read, my motivation to read a single article decreases.

I can’t get over it when my to-do lists are that long. I rarely come to rest when I have the thought in my back of my mind that there is something else to do, come on, get to work!

And at some point I get to the point where I either say, start reading all the articles as soon as possible (and then I just skim over them and don’t get anything from the content) or I make a hard cut and just empty my entire reading list.

Because knowing that I still have a lot of work to do is like carrying sandbags: the more they become, the more oppressive it becomes. A burden I’m trying to get rid of as soon as possible. And sometimes it is therefore necessary to think rationally about whether it is even worth it for me to read all these articles. Is it worth spending over an hour now to work through my reading list bit by bit, or do I prefer to go for a run and give my body a change from the office routine?

And it doesn’t really matter whether this is the Medium Reading List or the one in my browser…

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