At least once a week, I resolve to be a more disciplined blogger. It’s a weaker version of the New Year’s resolution. So, for example, I felt a twinge of it at the end of December and created a reading list: I would read a whack of books and blog about each of them. As a result, my January blogging schedule went well, so I extended it to February. After the first week, my resolution went all to poop. My cousin phoned and said: “Hey, Dave, I’m sick of winter. Let’s go to Florida.” In spite of myself, I said yes. After a horrid week of sunshine, I sat down to write another post when my daughter phoned. “Dad, I have a paper due tomorrow. Can you read it and tell me what you think? Oh yeah, and next week’s reading week, so I’m coming home. Maybe you can help me with two other papers I’m working on.” I love my daughter. She’s vibrant, smart, funny, interesting. But she’s not the sort of person around whom one accomplishes a lot of writing. After her reading week was done, my son announced that it was his reading week. It turns out that institutions of higher learning don’t necessarily agree upon when to schedule their reading weeks. And so February passed and I’d made barely a dint in my reading/writing schedule.
Naturally, I hate myself for my lack of discipline. And whenever I want to ratchet that feeling up a notch, I think of Maria Popova, creator of Brain Pickings. She has set herself up as the preeminent curator of interesting online stuff. Fast Company named her to its 2012 list of 100 most creative people in business. They also posted a rough chart of her work flow. The startling fact we learn is that it takes 5,000 hours a year, or more than 450 hours a month, to do this work of curation. Does she do it all on her own? If so, that works out to almost 14 hours each day (assuming no days off). That means either she has a great deal more energy than me, or a great deal more help – probably both. I know other people like this, too – editors who write novels who teach who blog who tweet who run triathlons. I get depressed just thinking about them.
In addition to energy and help, Maria Popova probably has something else going for her – a big corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is that bundle of neurons that joins one hemisphere of the brain to the other. I’ve read that women have a thicker corpus callosum than men, which (so the theory goes) accounts for why women are better than men at multitasking. Personally, if I have to deal with more than one thing at a time, it hamstrings me. I want to blog, but I also want to write novels. But if I’m going to make any progress on a novel, then I have to carve big chunks of time from my life and devote myself exclusively to the novel. Otherwise nothing happens. And so I neglect my blogging, my obligations as father, as husband, as dog-walker, etc. And the world collapses.
There is one other possibility that accounts for Maria Popova’s prodigious output. She may be a robot. The more I consider this, the more plausible it seems. We’ve had spam bots for years. And Google indexes web sites with “spider” algorithms that crawl through web pages. So why not tweak a bot to filter for “interesting”? Well, if she can do it, then so can I. In fact, this post was prepared by the nouspique bot. I had nothing to do with it (except develop the code). In fact, there is no I. There is no reader either – no you. Just snippets of code. Code for reading code written by code.
When your personal reading bot is finished with this post, send it over to Brain Pickings. Your bot will thank you for it.