Ario has written a great tale of personal woe when it comes to dealing with piles. I will quote a little here:

Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of pile reduction? Tasks where your sole involvement is to take the pile, let's call that N, and make N = 0, where 0 is really 0, nothing... or some state of equilibrium.

He goes on to give an example of the piles in his life including:

emails
open tabs
reading through rss feeds, blogs, friend's lists

Of course he also includes 'Trimming your nails' and 'Cutting Grass' - but the point is clear.

It struck me that our software seems to mimic our real-world pile reduction mentality.

As Ario writes - if only there were a way to let the information flow over us instead of having to 'mark feed as read'.

He has received a surprising number of comments on his post too - I think people are seriously stressed out by this problem!