Or, 100,000 Ways to Avoid Work and Life and Vice Versa.
This is linked from today’s Achenblog, Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach’s chronicle of whatever he darn well pleases:
Today we celebrate the 2 year anniversary of the Boodle.
Well, we’re celebrating it today even though a quick check shows that James the Ur-Boodler actually posted on April 7, 2005, at 4:10 PM (Somewhere along the line, I lost track of that date and time. But hold on to that thought, I’ll present an excuse later.).
To wit:
‘If I hit the “refresh” button on my browser a dozen times each time I visit the blog, would that help your page views?
Posted by: James | April 7, 2005 04:10 PM ‘
And with that comment to Joel’s item “Blog Brainstorming Session”, posted at 3:56 PM that very day, comments started trickling in, like grains of sand in an hourglass.
2 years, 100,000 comments.
Roughly 137 comments per day, 365 days a year.
One comment every 10 minutes on the average, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Here’s an alarming thought: at just about any given point in time, someone is either thinking about or composing a comment for the Boodle.
[Joel claims that this stands in stark contrast to the amount of time he spends composing and writing the Kits, but I suspect that he’s underselling himself for the sake of his editors, who want him to do stuff like, for example, work.]
For the Boodle’s one-year anniversary I wrote about the beginnings of the Boodle, and the End of Man.
This year I’m going to write about time, because that’s something we spend a lot of in the Boodle. When many of us have extra or spare time, we use it up there.
Some would say that Boodling is a waste of time, but what exactly is time, anyway? Philosophers and artists and scientists and payroll departments have speculated and theorized and argued and measured and recorded its passing for thousands of years, but all they’ve been able to conclude is that no one ever gets enough of it.
Up until Einstein, there were two distinct schools of thought regarding time; the scientific perspective that time is simply a dimension for the sequences of events, everflowing, unchanging and can be measured by the apparent motion of bodies through the heavens or the movement of very precise mechanisms; and the philosopher’s view that time is a mental construct humans employ to record information, a way of comparing and cataloging our observations.
But Einstein changed all that with his theories of Relativity, postulating that space and time are inseparable, and that experiential spacetime is influenced by mass, gravity, and relative velocity. In other words, your relative experience of time changes where you are and what you’re doing. For example, time really does drag if you’re having a heavy meal with people you don’t like on a train moving from New York to Chicago at an average speed of 67 miles an hour. Or listening to this year’s State of the Union Address. Agonizingly slow.
So, what does this mean for the Boodle?
Well, the Boodle’s accelerated to 60,000 comments per year (up from 40,000 the previous), which is what we in the IT/Web business call “a pretty good clip.” But the speed of the Boodle changes the relative experience of time when you’re Boodling versus “real life.” You may feel like you’ve been discussing the relative merits of legume preparations, lagomorphs, genetic engineering, politics, war, gardening, Illustrated Classics comic books, curling, gladiator movies and 60’s TV shows for 10 or 15 minutes, but as the Boodle has been hurtling along (and you along with it), an hour and a half has passed in the “real world.” You may have missed lunch entirely!
The question: Is this a problem? Like any good consultant, I’ll tell you: it depends.
We Boodlers have relationships with each other that extend out of the Boodle into each other’s minds and hearts. We empathize with each other’s hurts, we celebrate each other’s victories, we argue, we inform, we learn, we are charitable, we make each other laugh, we get upset at harsh words, we make time to visit and talk in person and online, we lift each other up when we’re feeling down; we feel for each other.
So, back to the question of time - and, perhaps, an answer.
Is time spent with your family - even your virtual second family - wasted?
I thank all of you for spending some of your valuable time with me.
- bc
Copyright by the author 2007, all rights reserved.
