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Backlog

I am an information junkie. Always have been. I'm one of those people that cares far more about the storyline in a video game than the actual game play. At work, I will spend time researching things related to solved problems, because I want to know exactly why it failed in the first place. And if someone learns something new, I want to go see what it's about, because I want to know what they know. I know it's not exactly the average outlook on life, but it is what it is.

Anyhow, this mentality leads to my habit of tracking various websites, blogs, and other internet web sources to keep my information flow constant. Doing all of this manually is tedious at best, though, so I use Google Reader to organize all of these feeds. It just makes things simpler to have a single source of RSS feeds, so that I can quickly browse through items related to my interests.

Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that I also try to keep up with my feeds on a regular basis. I don't have to read everything right away, but I do try to keep the number of outstanding items fairly low. Preferably, those items will be the newest items, so that I don't have any weeks-old items to read. Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. Sometimes I get busy at work, or blog authors will feel especially productive, so I end up with more reading material than I have time for. Eventually, I'll whittle down the backlog, but it takes time.

Recently, though, I think people have decided to screw with me. A little while ago, I had been neglecting the items in my various feeds for a week or so, so I had a bigger list of outstanding items than usual. I knew this, so I made a concerted effort to whittle that list down. In practice, this took something like an extra 15 minutes per day, so it wasn't a huge deal. Still, after a few days, I had the outstanding items down to a fairly manageable size (about a dozen). On that very night, one of the people I follow went on a rampage. She suddenly posted something like eight new items, all in the span of a couple of hours. Suddenly, I was faced with a more daunting task, just as I was starting to think I would be done. Just great.

Undaunted, I continued to plug away. Thanks to the added burden, it took me another few days to get the list back down to a manageable size. Remember, the usual authors continued to contribute to the pile of reading, so this wasn't quite as trivial as it sounded. Still, I kept at it and got it done. Even better, I resolved to finally remove the backlog. So, the week after, I made a concerted effort to read a few of those articles that I'd been meaning to eventually peruse. Some of it was interesting, some of it was boring, but most importantly, I was making steady progress. I had two outstanding items left, so it was just a matter of going through the motions to finish off the backlog.

Then came that dark Friday morning.

I was feeling good about my prospects, so I moseyed over to Reader to leisurely knock off one more article. The number of unread items was suddenly in the double digits. Huh, that was weird. Well, that occasionally happens when someone makes edits to older articles, so that the edited articles show up a second time in my feeds (RSS isn't perfect). I went to the usual suspects, figuring that it was more a matter of tidying the books than reading more material. However, that didn't lower the number any.

Surprised, I took a second look at the unread items count. It was sitting at thirty eight. Thirty eight? My unread items went from two to thirty eight overnight. What in the heck happened? Now I had a mystery on my hands, so I got to sleuthing. After a brief search, I discovered that IT Conversations was the culprit; the bulk of the thirty plus items came from them. They're not usually prone to the edit-and-repost behavior, but anything's possible. On closer inspection, they had in fact posted that many brand new items in a single morning.

What are the odds that they would suddenly post all of it when I'm roughly twenty minutes away from clearing my backlog? What's more, I have never seen them do a huge blast of content that way before. They're a fairly professional outfit, so their publishing schedule is akin to that of a newspaper. They don't necessarily publish every day, but it sure feels like they average an item or two per day. Now, it was a complete coincidence, but the sheer volume and the exact moment that they chose to publish seemed a little too convenient. There may have been some cosmic forces trying to tell me something here.

I've since whittled down my list, but it's still sitting at a higher number than I care for. I will get to it all over time, but my recent experiences have led me to a few conclusions:

  • I know how Sisyphus must have felt.
  • I need to learn how to read faster
  • Both Google Reader and karma, or its equivalent, have a wicked sense of humor

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