Most successful people,' as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, 'are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for producti… - Oliver Burkeman

When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.

Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby.

Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.