So with the “Am I Crazy” (Potter) challenge I got into talking about time management and spreadsheets quite a lot. This time I want to keep that separate so I’ll tag these “meta” posts instead.
For the purposes of this post I am two people. Let’s call them Paul and Shuggie. Paul is interested in reading, he was the one inspired to start this challenge, loved re-reading the AIC? posts and can’t wait to re-discover the joy of reading.
Shuggie is a nerd. He loves playing with spreadsheets and automating things. He likes the challenge because it gives him the opportunity to play with those spreadsheets again.
So Shuggie and Paul’s interests are mostly aligned. But only mostly. See, I found myself diving back into the spreadsheet and having to find and record a bunch of information (page counts, word counts, time spent reading) and even set up a page similar to the old spreadsheet I used for AIC (which sadly I no longer seem to have). Shuggie loves doing this but Paul is nervous that it will rob him of the simple joy of reading.
Even if the two can be balanced it’s a matter of time. It took maybe 40minutes to set up the spreadsheet again. That may not seem much but the reading time was 1:10 + 12mins at bedtime. Those numbers are too close. If the management time overtakes the reading time the enthusiasm for reading will suffer. (Shuggie disagrees, Paul is nodding)
Part of it is that it was a much simpler affair for AIC. All the books were paper. Which means that I tracked progress with a bookmark. I was recording time spent, but that was mostly noting the time on the clock before and after. And it was literally the first time I’d applied writing a spreadsheet to this problem. So it was new and fun.
The more I think of it it’s not ebooks that are the problem so much as the fact that having ebooks I can then switch between devices at will. But then I need to check progress using different measures – I have a whole page on the spreadsheet called “conversions” – so I need to find and enter the length of the book in pages, epub pages, koreader pages, kindle pages, kindle locations. Actually “have to” is not strictly true and that’s the issue.
All of this is to say that I think I will be trying to favour “Paul” whilst keeping “Shuggie” happy.