— read write play

How to cope when everything is interesting

Much of my research is done online, where developing some kind of strategy for managing my time has been essential in preventing me from losing days to endless surfing.¹ I’ve also felt far less guilty when I stopped assuming that everything that I read or spent time on should feed back into my current projects. The simplest part of my strategy reads like this: read, share, move on.

In practice, it works like this: if a site is worth remembering – will I want to read it or refer to it again next month? – then I bookmark it with delicious. If it’s interesting right now but seems unlikely to be of use or interest again, I share it on twitter. There’s a healthy degree of overlap, but I’m normally able to decide instantly where to store it. If the page is useful and relevant right now – an article for a paper I’m writing – then it’s referenced and the browser tab stays open for as long as I’m using it.

The impulse to share gives the moment some meaning and moves me on to the next task. Bookmarking with delicious allows me to tag the page so I can find it again quickly in the future; I can also see, at a glance, which tags are developing into project sized piles (on a related note: the key with delicious isn’t learning the technology, but learning the habit of using it).

The second strand of my strategy is this: learn to feel comfortable ignoring information.

Far, far more pours into my RSS feed reader than I can read in detail every day. So why not bring down my number of subscriptions? I’d rather deal with a flood than a famine. If there’s a site which is routinely left unread after a few weeks, I unsubscribe; if something vitally interesting/useful appears on the site at a later date, I presume I’ll hear about it back through the network of other sites that led me there in the first place. Otherwise, a full collection of interesting but unread links is still a good collection: think of the shape of Umberto Eco’s anti-library.

Finally, I tend towards the cult of done: though research sits precariously between the states of not knowing and ongoing action, my pattern of read, share and move on simulates completion, and frees my brain to concentrate on turning research good into words eloquent.

1. Or getting lost in the wikipedia labyrinth, where one quite interesting thing leads to another quite interesting thing until it’s dark and you’re cold and hungry, and there are wolves [↩]