I think a lot about how I can spend less time doing 23 Things @ NEFLIN and still get the benefit of learning the new technology--and the only thing I can come up with is cutting down on the blogging.
I can't really cut the exploration time. I try to keep it as concise, focussed, and task-oriented as possible: no tangents, no goofing around--but it still takes hours. I have to read enough of the background material to understand what I'm doing, and I have to explore enough to be able to see how things works and have something to report.
I feel if I pare it down any further, I'll just be pretending. And I seem to remember reading in the rules somewhere that perfunctory participation would not be counted.
So it looks like its the blogtime that's got to be reduced. I'm going to have to try to make my blogposts shorter. Again, the problem is, I don't know how to do that. I want to report on what I've learned. I'm already crystalizing to the very essence.
I guess my dilemma is that I'm afraid I'll actually expend more time by trying to shorten things even further. When writing a report of any kind, I rarely find myself intentionally padding. Just the opposite in fact. I usually trim my rough drafts so that the finished product winds up shorter than the original draft.
I think this is probably a different writing pattern from the one others use. I'm guessing here, but I think most writers start short and go long; that is, they start from an outline and then fill it in. I, on the other hand, start long and go short: amassing a huge wealth of disorganized details, grouping them, then throwing away whatever's redundant or unnecessary.
Sometimes, if I'm really pressed for space, I'll have to throw out important stuff, too. But I never know which details fall into which category (essential, sacrificial, or unimportant) until I do the sorting. Sorting is the way I process.
Perhaps others process in a different way. (Mulling this, I find myself toying with despair.)
One last observation before I abandon this angst-riddled and totally off-topic post: I looked through some of my fellow 23 Things participants' blogposts--as we have all been urged to do--and found some of them almost unimaginably brief.
Did people really have so little reaction to their explorations? Might they already be so familiar with the Things that it's so old hat that there's nothing much left to say? (Egad, does that make me feel like a dinosaur!)
Or are posts that compressed exactly what the 23 Things organizers want? A few parameters would help me to better know what's expected of me. Perhaps I should impose my own parameters. I could set myself a goal of spending no more than 2 hours per Thing and confine my blogposts to 500 words or less.
The difficulty is that I think such restrictions--self-imposed or otherwise--would be deeply, deeply unsatisfying to me. Like buying a 500-page book and finding that it contains only one word per page. That's all? I spent all that money for a book, and 500 words is all I get?
Translate that as: I participated in 23 Things and that's all I got out of it?
I guess my real problem is that I want to truly get something out of this experience. Something meaningful. Something real. I want to actually learn something. (More accurately, a lot of things.) And that is just going to take some time.
So I guess my best plan is to carry on, avail myself of every time-saving practice that I can, sample rather than savor, blog fast, and hope that after a while, I'll get familiar enough with the process to get into a rhythm and become a little more efficient. We live in hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment