{"id":795,"date":"2026-09-30T06:43:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T06:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/09\/30\/treat-your-to-read-pile-like-a-river-oliver-burkeman\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T06:43:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T06:43:48","slug":"treat-your-to-read-pile-like-a-river-oliver-burkeman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/09\/30\/treat-your-to-read-pile-like-a-river-oliver-burkeman\/","title":{"rendered":"Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>this means treating your &#8220;to read&#8221; pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).<\/p>\n<p>Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it&#8217;s liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option. There&#8217;s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place. I like to think of it as the productivity technique to beat all productivity techniques: finally internalizing the implications of the fact that what&#8217;s genuinely impossible \u2013 the clue is in the name! \u2013 cannot actually be done.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oliverburkeman.com\/river\">www.oliverburkeman.com\/river<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>this means treating your &#8220;to read&#8221; pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it&#8217;s liberating, too, as you slowly begin [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-reading"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}