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by rg111 1515 days ago
Yes, I suffer dearly from it.

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed, it causes cognitive paralysis and I just mindlessly browse HN, Twitter, Reddit etc. Or I just go on accumulating stuff.

I append to my list of to-read books, to my to-read papers, to-check-out languages and frameworks, to-read articles and so on.

With information overflow, I have become an information aggregator- I download dozens of podcast episodes, add a lot of RSS feeds to reader apps, bookmark a lot of Tweets, save a lot of articles to Pocket, and the list goes on.

I am always anxious, always worried that I am not getting any work done or making any intellectual progress. This feeling lingers strongly and I keep aggregrating "stuff".

Some of it is me. I am interested in wide variety of topics- wildly unrelated. I get a very little done, but keep adding to " to-X" lists.

I am seriously worried about this and it upsets my mental piece.

I have to brutally prioritize. Or learn to simply abandon wishes. Or I am going to be crushed, if I am not already.

Funny thing is I never waste time watching memes, following stupid social-media or playing games. I am having to choose from unhealthily large amount of stuff that will enrich me, make me better. This is was makes the matter depressingly worse.

No enrichment is actually happening because of the paralysis I talked about earlier.

3 comments

I am the same way.

One thing that helped me in the past to focus and move past the paralysis was to meditate and exercise.

Life has been hectic and I lost my routine, but I will try then again once I can establish a routine again.

I'm in the same boat. My current plan is to take a few weeks off and finish each one of my "to-X" lists before they become truly unmanageable.
No dice there for me.

I have entire full-semester university courses in my list.

If working through them 5-7 each day, I can finish a full-semester course- with psets, midterms and assignments in 20-30 days.

Even if I take a few weeks off, I will only finish 20-30% of my to-finish-courses list.

Good luck to you.

So much this!

I'm so annoyed that I keep consuming all that pseudo-educational content without actually gaining any knowledge from it.

I don't have anything particular to learn, but anytime I hit something interesting, I search for it, see how much material I would need to get through, and I give up and revert to browsing HN.