It's weird how when I don't respond to someone's email, it's because I'm busy,' observes the novelist Leila Sales, poking fun at this tendency in her… - Oliver Burkeman

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life," wrote Nietzsche, "because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself."

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.

My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing,' reads one splendid anonymous comment on a Washington Post article by the advice columnist Carolyn Hax. 'I'm 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that's worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I'm not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.