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Tell HN: Drowning in information but still missing everything

5 points

12 hours ago

| 4 comments

I need to vent. I'm a Senior PM and genuinely don't know how anyone stays on top of everything anymore. My morning routine has become a 2-hour anxiety spiral:

- Check Slack for overnight fires - Skim 200+ unread messages - Open Twitter to see what's happening in my space - Check if competitors launched anything - Glance at 3 newsletters I subscribed to and never actually read - Scroll LinkedIn because apparently that's where industry news lives now - Check Product Hunt because what if something relevant launched - Peek at HackerNews for tech trends

And after all that? I still missed that our competitor launched a major feature. Found out from a SALES CALL. Two weeks late. The worst part is the anxiety. I subscribe to 12 newsletters. I skim maybe 2. I read 0 thoroughly. But I can't unsubscribe because what if I miss something important? I've tried everything:

- RSS readers (dead) - Saved folders (never check them) - ChatGPT for research (doesn't know my context, gives generic answers) - Zapier automations (broke after 2 weeks) - Just "accepting I'll miss things" (the anxiety won)

My evening doomscroll is half "staying current" and half anxiety management. My partner thinks I'm addicted to my phone. Maybe I am. But it's not entertainment—it's fear of being the PM who missed the signal everyone else saw. I spend more time GATHERING information than actually THINKING about what to build. Anyone else feel this way? Or have I just lost the plot?

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gnatman

1 hour ago

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Are you sure it’s necessary to know about competitor moves the instant they happen? I’m a salesman not a PM but I don’t feel the least bit embarrassed about hearing of a competitor feature from a customer. In fact now I have an opportunity to ask them questions about their need.

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pmdulaney

6 hours ago

[-]

I would say, seriously, find a new job. It is demeaning to a human being to be in the position you find yourself, especially if there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

But if leaving this job is not a viable option at this time, I would say: Take advantage of your innate strength as a human being, which is to say, intuitive thinking. You're never going to match a machine when it comes to quantitative analysis of huge bodies of data.

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thunderfork

30 minutes ago

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How much of these signals actually matter? If the only reason "accept you'll miss things" didn't work was "anxiety", you need Zoloft, not Notion.

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mercurialsolo

12 hours ago

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The slop is everywhere

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akhil08agrawal

9 hours ago

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Yeah. But this is not about the slop. This is more about the fact that I need to be everywhere, at all platforms, but really can't.

And really need a solution for that.