The Setup

I was thinking today about what might be called my online overhead. This is the amount of time dedicated to things online no matter what the day holds in store. Mainly what I mean is reading. This is the time I spend reading online before I get to any actual productivity. I think that there must be some input before there can be any output, and so I don't regard this as lost time so much as an investment in later achievements.

There are my emails, of course, and relatively few of those are ones that require some kind of reply, but that is the first thing I'm looking for. The next most important thing after that is news. I get a few different emails which convey some aspect of the day's news to me. One comes from the Daily Beast and paints a general picture. Several more come from Politico, and cover some part of the political world. After those news emails are a variety of others which are progressively less important.

More news comes from a few websites, Google News and Huffington Post being among them. Still more news comes from the many blogs I keep up on. The blog aggregator also delivers my comics, among other things. I would estimate that the entire regimen takes something like an hour and a half if I have been keeping up. It is considerably more than that if I have been delinquent on any of these things, and that happens periodically.

I have been attempting to identify inefficiencies in the process so that I might be able to shorten the process. I certainly cannot do without it or delay to a later part of the day, because it's all I want to do until I do it. I also need to do it before I can writing anything or really talk to anyone. I do hope to tighten up the process, but that is all I can do, because it is as important a part of the day as eating or sleeping.