especially when you are bogged down with trying to get a lot of work done in the limited duration of your postdoc.

In my experience, towards the end of grad school and in early postdoc was also a time of some desperation– we all hear stories about how hard it is to get a job in the field, and so when I was earlier in my career I definitely took the “spray of buckshot” approach to job applications: I applied to anything and everything I could remotely be considered qualified for. It stressed me out, and worse, it wasted my time. I can also tell you now, having hired a postdoc myself, that I am not the only person that does this– part of the reason that astronomy jobs have pools of 300+ applicants is that people are submitting the same application to a lot of jobs they have not closely evaluated. You can’t blame anyone for doing that, because seemingly no one is taught how to decide whether a job is suitable for them or not– but don’t do that. The people reading your applications can tell.

There are good and bad aspects to casting a wide net, just 