Reading, Writing, Thinking, Planning

I don’t play on my computer. I RWTP on my computer. Well, when I’m playing WoW, I play on my computer. But I only average about 3 hours per week in-game. The rest of my time is spent reading, writing, thinking, and planning. Generally in that order. I don’t read the newspaper. The only news I read comes to me from the BBC through twitter. So, I don’t feel guilty about the hour I’m on the computer that I would be reading the StarTrib or watching Channel 5 if I were a normal person. Since the BBC only uses up about 10 minutes of my day, that’s 50 minutes I can use reading all my other feeds.

Those include blogs of friends and family, a few cartoons, and random people I only know or know of through the internet. The bulk of my reading however, is in depth technical and professional writing on topics including: social networking, social media, collaboration, technology in education, productivity, life hacks, business, marketing, theology, startup, programming, computer science, group dynamics, emerging church praxis and theology, creativity, writing, and monasticism. Then, most of my technical books are pdf’s or online–more reading on my laptop. So, all this reading is hardly play.

Nor is all that reading passive. Most of my reading takes place on the web, which means I am generally able to respond to those posts and articles. Unfortunately, I generally do most of this writing before stoping to think. Someday, I hope to sucessfully transition to RTWP, but at this point, I do more reacting in comments than thoughtful response. I’m working on that. Another factor in this is that most of my feed reading take place late at night, after Kim has gone to bed. So, my thinking turns to dreaming. It might seem like a waste of time. But I always process things more thoroughly the following day in the midst of applying yestedays knowledge to todays activities. I’m ok with that, and I might even propose that it’s the best option (if I were into suggesting that all options fall into a linier hierarchy). This also means that my thinking and writing are more intertwined than I suggested earlier. Because all my writing is based on previous thinking. Just not necessarily the current topic at hand.

Note to Self: Write an app/script/utility that lets me maintain a list of things I read today, so that I can comment on them tomorrow.

Then then planning happens. I need GTD. I am the deffinition of, “out of sight, out of mind.” If I don’t do ubiquitous capture, it goes beyond dealing with personal lack of peace, I will just forget and never even remember all the ideas and tasks I have. I *must* capture them and put them in a system I trust. Just today I got an invite to try out OmniFocus. I’m playing with it and want to give it a decent test. But I can’t trust it just it. Right now, the only thing I trust is my emacs running planner mode, which is basically just a wiki with good scripts. So, I quickly dump my immediate tasks in there. I add to my exponentially growing list of SomedayMaybe’s. And I take notes on current and future projects. All this in the most glorious text editor ever invented. But several times a day omni releases a new alpha build of their product, and I’m getting to close to putting all my work stuff in there, so I can give it a decent test. (As opposed to 37 “test-n” tasks).

Needless to say, this keeps me pretty busy. (I didn’t even get into coding, learning to code, and reading code–also generally in that order). But when I’m on my computer, I’m generally doing anything but “playing.”