It feels like defeat. The number has passed 200. I knew it was coming.

I should probably back up a little here. This summer we took a vacation. I had every intention of spending time on that vacation reading and writing. Specifically I was planning to spend time reading and writing about Agile in various ways. The details aren’t all that important because it didn’t happen. The details of why it didn’t happen are also fairly unimportant. It’s really the aftermath I’m looking at.

The aftermath of over 200 unread posts showing on my news reader. The aftermath of two weeks worth of unread emails from LinkedIn groups, up to 5 a day in some cases. The unread stream on Twitter and Facebook.

The numbers weren’t that large at first. They were smaller, but still pretty big. They also kept getting bigger. This brought feelings of being overwhelmed. It created a negative feedback loop. On an intellectual level I knew there were various solutions to the problem. The most obvious one, information decay.

For Twitter and Facebook information decays extremely fast. For a time I used to try to at least skim every thing that went by on each of these services. Over time my use case has changed and I now accept that I am going to skip a lot of what comes through. I have become OK with that. This was part of getting out of that negative feedback loop. It was only part of it because I had a lot of trouble letting information decay from some of the other sources. There I had to accept relevancy.

I have 224 feeds in my news reader. There is no direct translation between number of feeds and number of articles. Truth is, some feeds can pop out 20 articles in a day and some only deliver 1 on a good month. I had to stop reading things that were only of passing interest and focus on things of real interest. This is hard for me.

I have long been driven to know as much as I can. I internalized early in life that “knowledge is power.” Possibly it was from seeing it on a splash screen in Mortal Kombat. (Though apparently the correct quote was “There is no knowledge that is not power.”) For some reason it stuck, like “all your base are belong to us” stuck for some. Maybe it stuck due to the concept of “grok” from Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” which I had read the first time some years earlier. In any event, this aspect of me made it hard to let go of certain articles that seemed interesting as ones I would never read. I did it though.

Eventually the number started to come down. The number of new feeds added per month has also finally dropped below 1. When the number finally crossed below 100 I started to think about speed-reading as a way to read more in the time I had. Sometime in the week or two following the Amazon free app of the day was a speed reading trainer so I figured, why not?

I’ve taken an initial test or two for baseline and started to work the “training” part of it. I’m not sure how well it will translate into actual reading of books and on-screen content though. I will likely post an update at some point in the future.

What I do know is that my number is down below 20. (It had been falling steadily before I started to look into speed reading, so that’s not a factor.) I also know that all of those are actually links to podcasts that I am slowly finding time to listen to, and not 1 is to an article for me to read.

Tracking down show-stopping bugs in unfamiliar code is always fun.

Actually, it’s not. So I take breaks between attempts. This time I looked out the window and saw gently falling snow.

The flakes look soft and fluffy. The evergreen in the parking lot across the street has a picturesque coating of white. I can imagine a quiet stillness outside. Sounds normally close and loud instead seem distant and muffled.

I step outside and am greeted by the chilled air. My jacket is still upstairs and unneeded in the mild weather. The cloud cover has muted the sun, precluding the need for shades. The normal sounds of the light industrial district I work in are missing. The nearby highway is silent. I see a car in my peripheral vision before I hear it. It glides past nearly silent. Standing there I close my eyes for just a moment.

For a moment the bitter cold of the last three months hasn’t happened. The returning critters are silent. The demands of the office faded. The craziness of a fast sale and pending close forgotten. The need for a place to go and a means to get there unimportant. For a moment.

I don’t really feel that way. I have trouble with silence.

In an office setting this can be tough. Why? I also have trouble with blocking out the world. I need speakers loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough to not disturb others. Alternatively I need headphones that don’t block out what little noise is around while allowing me to hear clearly.

At home this translates to either a radio or TV on all the time. With no radio on the main level I actually make use of the digital music stations on cable often.

There is, of course, one more thing about this. Heather likes silence. She would prefer the radio background noise was non-existent. I think she has been more or less OK with most of the background music I put into place during the day. On the weekends I wait as long as I can in the morning before I put it on. In the car? Well, she’s never needed me to completely cut it all out.

This random thought brought to you by me needing to write more. Normally I would try to make something that had more of a conclusion or point, but a headache is starting and I want to force myself to put stuff online.