I’m thinking again along the lines of ‘Have you read? Have you heard? Have you seen? Have you been?’ – basically, the fact that we can’t read or experience everything that we should or might want to. The idea that there is more to do than we have time for.

A basic fact of modern life. A form of FOMO perhaps. Certainly not an original observation. But it always leaves me wondering how people individually reconcile and accept what they have to miss out on. How others decide how to spend their consumption time.

Thinking this way reminds me of an old Jasper Carrot stand-up sketch, where he does a calculation for how much time we spend sleeping, eating, working, and on the toilet, etc.

In the end, once all chores were added together, he calculates that he only has a few minutes left to actually live. I found it hilarious as a kid (maybe mostly the part about spending weeks on the loo), but also mildly worrying. I sensed there was truth in the gag. That we have limited time and we need to choose how to spend it.

The thing that has me thinking this way recently is weaknotes. And even just more regular types of individual blogging. How much time should we give this sort of content? How much is it worth?

From what I can see, the weeknotes thing in particular is getting more popular again and I calculate that they tend to be around 500 to 1,000 words per weekly post. Let say on average 800 words, with each one having a few links that you need to click out to. Also, each post needs to be reflected on and processed a little. Conscious consideration over brute consumption.

As a slow reader, I’m going to say that in order to properly consume and process each weeknote will take 10 min.

If I read just six peoples notes, that’s an hour of my time. Seems fine. But in an industry, a company, or a community, there’s likely more than six folk whose weeknotes could be of value to you to read. And what if it gets even more popular. I have over 500 LinkedIn connections. Let say just half of them write weeknotes. That’s around 42 hours of weeknote reading per week. That’s more than a healthy weeks work.

As the above liked doingweeknotes.com states though under ‘the weeknotes rules’…

Suddenly there’s a flood of weeknotes to read every week, and no-one has time to read them all. That would make the whole idea a bit pointless.

This site and advice is more for teams and orgs, but the practice in reality seems to be getting more openly popular. And my wondering about weeknotes goes for blog posts just as much.

In fact, pull it all up even further, to the level of anything written in LinkedIn, or anywhere. How often do we stop and think about our output and the value of it compared to the cost of adding to existing noise?

Again, these aren’t highly original observations about opportunity cost and choosing where we spend attention in the market of ideas, but I think my point is that I’m not seeing much about the ethical responsibility of content creation. Or at least, that people don’t often apply that lens on their weeknotes and blog posts and writing. Case in point perhaps.

What’s the point of this post? But also, what is my purpose for this post? Maybe that’s more it, and what has me rambling and thinking out loud. Perhaps we just need more content strategy, individually.

A mission and vision to our output and noise. Not just a thoughtless practice.