My name is Jesse and I am an addict
I have a confession to make…
I am addicted to information.
I can’t stop reading, learning, processing, consuming information.
If I could I would research day in day out with little time for else. Wait! I already do!
How does one deal with this?
I have been to conferences where the speakers have talked about trying to stay ahead of the wave by becoming very knowledgeable in only a few areas but maintaining a cursory understanding of a much much larger array of topics.
But I am an addict. And as other nerds know it’s very hard to tame the monkey. I would say I spend about 70% of my time working/playing/learning new technologies. Sounds like a dream?… welcome to my nightmare.
Currently I have 45000 unopened emails. Sure many of them are spam but I do have spam filters on my inbox. The others… Hundreds of mailing lists that I have signed up over the ~10 year tenure of my current email address.
I also have over 10000 bookmarks that I have accumulated over the years with every intention of returning at some point. If I even get to a small percentage of them I will be happy.
Then there is the “clipped/read later/evernote” bunch that are saved and waiting for my eyes to give them the time of day. But they are also too populous to be manageable.
Finally I have a library of pdf’s and ebooks measuring gigabytes in size (that’s text only people!) waiting to be read. By the time I read them the technologies they describe are quite likely to be outdated.
So I ask you. What am I to do? How can I slow down this landslide of information? How do I decide where to spend my time? Right now I am pulled between programming microcontrollers to work with android devices and working on massively scalable distributed multiversion control concurrent databases. Or do I spend my waking hours on further tuning linux kernels? Finishing my iOS project? Building a public cloud agnostic SAAS for erlang/otp applications? AHHH! Down the rabbit whole I go…