At times, I get frustrated by the amount of reading material that pours in through both my postal mail and my e-mail, every item demanding my attention. There is so much that I can’t keep up with it. And I find myself piling up reams of material in a “To Be Read” file, either as a pile of paper or overflowing electronic files or a crowded computer desktop.
In just one recent week, my mailbox and computer in-box brought more reading material than I could devour in a month of Sundays. The Writer, Writer’s Digest, Southern Writers Magazine, Imprimis, Journal of Southern History. And more. Throw in a dozen or more once-, twice-, or thrice-a-week e-zines I subscribe to and numerous blog posts I follow, to say nothing of article manuscripts and book galleys to proof. And I haven’t touched on the ubiquitous posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. Or keeping up with all the news of the world, nation, state, and local community. Or the voluminous amount of reading I must do in my research for my articles and books and blog posts.
My day is prescheduled for me. If I allow it.
Every so often, I force myself to stop everything else to plow through those accumulated piles, reading a few, skimming others, and merely glancing at still others before deleting them or relegating them to the legendary File 13. I wonder why I bothered to save them in the first place.
I’m convinced that part of my inability to remember things as well as I once did is this innundation with information. (It can’t be purely the rest of aging!) Our minds are overloaded, just like an overloaded electrical circuit. And you know what results when that happens! Zzzzzzt! There’s a short circuit.
So what’s the solution? People have offered several. And I’ve probably tried them all, some more than once, before I again fall off the wagon and begin to see the “to-be-read” pile growing again.
Go on a vacation. Media free, computer free, mail free. But the pile is still there, just much bigger than before, when I get back. (No vacation lasts forever.)
Prioritize reading material. But that requires taking time to at least skim the material to determine the place it deserves on the priority list.
Hit DELETE. Unsubscribe. But then you feel uninformed. Besides, you might accidentally delete something really important. Or the magazine is offering such a great deal to extend your subscription that you just can’t pass it up.
I’ve found (not to say that I’ve perfected this point; otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing on this topic, would I?) that the key, as with most things in life, is moderation. I must resist the urge to sign up for every free e-zine, to follow every interesting blog, to subscribe to every magazine, no matter how interesting and helpful they promise to be. To stop all of them cold turkey would be intellectual suicide.
I must prioritize. In e-mail, only items that are directly business related must be answered. All e-zines will have to wait their turn. All appeals from social or political causes must wait even longer. And spam e-mails that are trying to get me to sign up for a book, training class, or “special report” that will revolutionize my writing and make me a millionaire, DELETE!
But there is one bit of reading that must get the No. 1 slot every day, regardless of what other things are pressing: my reading of God’s Word. Watchman Nee’s motto was “No Bible, no breakfast!” And legendary preacher Charles Spurgeon said, “He who rushes from his bed to his business, and waiteth not to worship, is as foolish as though he had not put on his clothes . . . and is as unwise as though he dashed into battle without arms or armor.”
With so many good things to read, how could I fail to read the best thing?
I also must limit the time I spend on social media and resist the urge to watch every hilarious cute cat video that gets posted. I must even limit how much time I spend in writing my own blog posts. Although I try to do my best writing on this to create a good impression and entice more readers, thereby expanding my writer’s platform and showing that I’m a professional, I also realize that it’s only one arrow in the arsenal. And a blog post’s lifespan is about a day (if that). Besides, it’s meant to be casual and conversational, not academic and literary perfection. So what if there are some dangling modifiers or typos? You get what you get, such as it is, in the amount of time I can afford to devote to it. That’s what I’ve done on this post anyway.
Now I have to shift gears and resume reading for the research I’m doing on my current writing project. But first I must check my e-mail and Facebook. Priorities, you know!
Copyright (c) 2018, Dennis L. Peterson