It’s impossible to keep up with everything. Consider thinking of areas of your life like rivers, not buckets.

Oliver explains rivers not buckets in “Treat your to-read pile like a river”.

(from the Oliver Burkeman article above)

The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn’t filter failure. It’s filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.

…

My challenge, information-wise, isn’t about finding a needle in a haystack. It’s that I’m confronted on a daily basis, in Carr’s words, by “haystack-sized piles of needles.”

…

It’s not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your “big rocks”, but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.

The success of the organization of your web site will be determined largely by how well your site’s information architecture matches your users’ expectations. A logical, consistently named site organization allows users to make successful predictions about where to find things.

Search is the only practical navigation in the “long tail”

Site structural themes

• Sequences
  • Straight linear sequence
  • Linear sequences with supporting digressions
• Hierarchies
  • Simple hub-and-spoke structure
  • More complex hierarchy
• Webs

The nonlinear usage patterns typical of web users do not absolve you of the need to organize your thinking and present it within a clear, consistent structure that complements your overall design goals.

Figure 3.9 summarizes the three basic organization patterns against the linearity of the narrative and the complexity of the content.