The Book Stack Problem
There's a stack of books on my desk right now. Eleven of them. Not counting the three on the nightstand or the ones on the shelf that I've started and put down in the last six months with every intention of returning to them.
At some point in my thirties I would have found this troubling. I had a system — I think there was a spreadsheet involved at one point — for tracking what I was reading, what was queued, what I'd finished. The goal was to have a well-managed reading pipeline. To make progress.
I've given up on the pipeline.
The book stack is not a project to be managed. It's not a to-do list. It's more like a record of things that seemed interesting at the moment I acquired them, maintained in physical form so I can see them without opening an app. Some of those books I'll read. Some I'll read the first fifty pages of and put down because I got what I needed in the first fifty pages. Some I'll never open.
I say this because I've noticed that software people — present company very much included — have a tendency to apply project management logic to things that don't benefit from it. The reading pipeline. The "learning queue" for new technologies. The elaborate note-taking system that takes more time to maintain than it saves in retrieved notes.
The urge makes sense. We spend our days breaking down problems into tasks, estimating effort, tracking completion. The tools work for that domain. The failure mode is when the tools start getting applied to things that are more like gardens than projects. Things that are better tended than executed.
Reading is like that for me. The stack is the garden. Books come in when they seem interesting and leave when they're done or when they're clearly not for me right now. I don't track it. I don't feel bad about the unread ones.
The book currently on top: a novel. I won't say which one because then I'll feel obligated to review it. But it's not software, which is sometimes the point. There's a specific decompression that happens when the thing you're reading has no applicability to your work.
I've started treating the non-work books as maintenance rather than leisure. Not because I'm unable to just enjoy something without instrumentalizing it, but because framing it as maintenance gives it the same priority as the other maintenance I do. It gets protected time. It doesn't get bumped by something urgent.
Eleven books on the desk. I'll probably finish two of them before the stack changes shape again.
There's no productivity lesson here. I'm done looking for them.