Struggles with the "Attention Economy"

As the number of available inputs continues to increase, it has become more and more difficult for me to get everything done that I want done and to decide what to do with the limited amount of time left to me each day.

I'm talking about all tasks across my life, including work items as well as personal tasks. For now, I'll focus on the personal things.

I have a lot of content waiting to be consumed. I am currently subscribed to 29 podcasts. Across these podcasts, I have 80 items to either listen to or watch. In addition to that, I have a DVR with about 10 different series stored. These series total roughly 19 hours of video to watch. I am also subscribed to Netflix.com, with 381 items in my queue. I have an Audible.com account with about 7 hours of audio I haven't yet listened to. And, this list doesn't include about a dozen books that are on my list of "things to read once there's a bit more time."

I believe the problem I'm faced with isn't something unique to me. It is the problem of the attention economy. There simply isn't enough time to do all of the things we need to do. How do you find the balance? I'm still working on it.

According to the Wikipedia article linked to above, the answer lies in becoming good at "filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information."

And, to that end, I have been reading (and listening to) Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. The central premise of the book is to prioritize all things to be done into a list, and then prioritize that list by importance and impact. Finally, attack the most important and biggest items on the list first.

The author, Brian Tracy, basically says to give up on the idea of completing everything; there simply isn't enough time to do it all. I'm not sure whether I can commit to doing something like that. The least important items, according to Mr. Tracy, should either get delegated to others or simply cut from the list entirely.

Of course, I'm not getting everything done now, as it is. So, it just might be a good idea to explicitly choose the items that don't get done, rather than to try and do everything and be surprised and what gets left unfinished.

For now, I can commit to finish reading the book. Onces that's complete, we can take it from there.