Too much to read

'Information overload is filter failure.' Most of us probably know this quote by Clay Shirky and agree with it. I do. It relates well to what I love about the web. There's information abundance, but the web is structured in such a way that we can pull information towards us that we find interesting. And push away things that are not relevant to us.
There are great tools to help you with this. Feedly is I think my core filtering tool. Twitter would come in second place. (It continues to surprise me how little people use an RSS subscription tool like Feedly...)

I hardly ever read something right away though. This is where Pocket come into play. Pocket is where I save interesting online posts and article to read later.

But - and this is where I'm interested in your experiences - I find that more and more there is just too much interesting stuff to read. My Pocket is completely stacked with articles I hope to read some day. And this is just the 'digital' stuff that's interesting. I have a long list of books that I hope to read as well.

To be clear: This doesn't worry me. This is a fact of life. It always has been this way, I think. The thing I wonder about is whether my huge list of things I hope to read and think about really is the result of filter failure (which to me has a negative connotation)? My filters are pretty strict and I definitely don't want to read everything - even if I could. So I don't think I have a filter problem. I don't have an information overload problem either, because I don't experience it as overload. But I do find there are too many interesting people and thoughts to keep up with. The interesting people and thoughts aren't the problem either. So what is? I don't really know. I do know ideally I would want to keep up with them. Not always be behind on reading. Maybe the biggest problem I have is that I would love to give the interesting people and thought more recognition. I see blogposts, books or articles that are just great. I want them to keep up the good work, but to do that we have to share the post/article and/or comment on it. Which leads to less time to read other blogposts/article. Sounds like I or we're running around in circles... ;-)

Anyway, let me just end this post with thanking all the great people who take time to share their thoughts in books, articles and blogposts. Sometimes I wish I could say this to you personally - and I do quite often. I hope my reading behavior is also seen as a thank you to them.

Curious if you can relate to this and how you deal with it.

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