Overcoming overwhelm through the judicious use of caring a little bit less

An early version of this article appeared in The Deliberate, my semi-weekly newsletter loosely focused on the use, cultivation, and development of attention. If you like what you read you can subscribe here.

I see two major (and opposite) approaches you could take when trying to be more deliberate with attention.

The first is to simply be much more selective about what enters your awareness. This is the realm of digital minimalism, Essentialism, and even the recent obsession with Marie Kondo and The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. These folks advocate a way of interacting with the world where your filter for actually engaging in something is extremely fine grained. Not much gets through it and the end result is a much more manageable amount of “stuff” — whether that’s things to read, number of emails, or socks in your drawer. This is generally the approach that resonates most clearly with the way my own brain works. I’ve been a minimalist in most ways for a long time.

The other approach is to care much less about restricting the amount of stuff that enters your life and instead be extremely comfortable dipping in and out of the “streams” at will. These are the folks who follow thousands of people on Twitter but feel no desire to be a timeline completionist. They happily let emails or Slack notifications pile up and trust the most important things will eventually bubble to the surface. Rands talks about this as his ability to “taste the soup” and he seems like a pretty successful and well-adjusted guy.

I always discounted this way of operating because it seems bonkers. How can you not live a highly curated life? Especially since I have a tool like GTD sitting in my back pocket I feel incredibly well equipped to make sure everything is always being accounted for and every open loop is being closed with dispatch.

However, I’m starting to become more and more interested in how I can adopt more of this “soup tasting” mentality when it comes to more parts of my life. If I’m honest with myself, sticking to the minimalism approach of attention management sometimes feels like a war of attrition that I’m not capable of winning. It requires a constant vigilance that can feel righteous and sacred on good days and exhausting and Sysiphian on bad days.

How nice would it feel to not care about curating the information or opportunities that are heading in my direction at any one time and instead just allow myself to dip in and out when my time, attention, and inclination allow me to?

I look to my relationship with something like Apple Music as a good example of this. I have at my fingertips what seems like all the music that has ever been created and new batches of albums and playlists algorithmically selected for me every day yet I don’t feel any overwhelming urge to “complete” Apple Music. It’s just a thing I use when I want to and forget about it the rest of the time. It makes me wonder what else I could treat more like that rather than as an open loop that I need to close in order to feel better.

I’ve taken a small step in this direction over the past couple days. This probably sounds crazy to most people but I actually used to create projects in Things to keep track of which video games I was playing and which books I was currently reading. I didn’t want to have too many of these in progress at any one time so I figured if I visualized my “work in progress” I would be less likely to try to tackle too many at once. To the surprise of no one, putting video games and books in task management software is a great way to make them feel like work.

Now I’m trying my best to not think about things like books I’m reading (or want to read) and the games I’m playing (or want to play) as things to be minimized but as pools of entertainment that I can dip into when I want, enjoy in the moment, and continue (or not continue) with however I see fit. (And again, I do realize that this is how most people treat ostensibly fun things but hey, this is apparently how my brain works).

Can I extend this elsewhere? To Twitter? To RSS? To email and Slack? Who knows! Am I on the verge of a digital rumspringa? Or is this just a temporary gap in my minimalism armor that can simply be repaired with a little elbow grease and a pep talk?

I’m Sam. I work for The Ready in Washington D.C. I tweet. I write a newsletter called The Deliberate. I take pictures of mostly boring things.