Recently I decided to follow other PF bloggers’ example and post a brief round-up of the best articles that have appeared on Funny about Money each month. So, for the inaugural edition, here are my choices:
Yesterday I described a small epiphany that freed up as much as two hours a day of precious morning time. It helped to relieve the stress and frustration aggravating the bruxism, the insomnia, and the general irritability that help to make my life miserable. Surprisingly, a day later another, equally significant revelation dawned.
Second moment of insight: blogging has been consuming way too large a chunk of my day. And because I’d been doing it first crack out of the box, every single day, it added to the time-stress created by a huge raft of daily chores that need to be done before I can even think about going to work or having a life. It prevented me from getting any exercise in the morning, and…well, it can’t be healthy to spend hours on end staring into a computer monitor.
The minute I would roll out of the sack, usually around 5:00 or 5:30 a.m., I would take the dog out briefly and then stumble directly into my office to call up WordPress. This had become such a firmly established routine that Cassie would run straight to the office after finishing her morning business.
Then I would spend one to two hours writing and cruising the blogosphere. From there it was on to cleaning the pool and watering the plants, another one- to two-hour set of tasks. All this took place before I so much as brushed my teeth, to say nothing of feeding the dog, brewing a pot of coffee, and fixing my own breakfast.
I don’t want to quit blogging, first because I enjoy it and second because FaM is just beginning to make a little money. But long before this, I’ve thought that I devote far too much of my attention to computer screens and far too little to living a normal life.
A day after the pool insight, I happened to feel rested enough to write three posts in one day. As I was about to publish the second one, it occurred to me that I could buy a day of vacation from blogging by scheduling that post to go live 24 hours forward. And the third post could go up two days forward. Hmmm…two days in which I would not have to write for the Internet.
I already had a guest post in-house and was about to ask Stephen Taddie for permission to post his latest investment letter: two more days off! Suddenly, I had the makings of a five-day break.
Next morning I stayed far away from the computer, much to the dog’s confusion. Didn’t even check the e-mail.
Now, with neither the pool-and-yard frenzy nor the writing-and-surfing session starting my day, a good four hours of the morning were returned to me. If I got up at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., by 7:00 or 7:30 I was ready to get on the road. And best of all: I felt neither frazzled nor horsewhipped!
So, that’s how I’m going to deal with blogging from here on out:
• Write about three posts twice a week, and schedule them out over the coming days. • Do at least one easy-to-scribble retrospective “Best of FaM” post a month. • Solicit guest posts to give friends and fellow bloggers a say at FaM. • On days when I’m not writing, stay away from the computer monitor as much as possible.
After a couple of blog-free and pool labor-free days, I began to feel a lot less stressed. It’s no wonder my temper has been short, and no wonder I’ve been grinding my teeth. On top of the workplace headaches, I’ve been trying to do too many at-home jobs—half of them unpleasant jobs—in way too little time.
So, two small flashes of insight led to reorganizing routine activities so as to free up four hours of time—every day. Have you had a similar experience? What strategies do you use to keep yourself from being overwhelmed by responsibilities and tasks?
Proprietor Carrie atIt’s Frugal Being Green kindly invited me to contribute a guest post, to help fill in while she’s out of town. So I’ve offered an update on the “food futures” project. It should go up tomorrow, July 27. Be sure to visit, and while you’re there, don’t fail to explore the entire nicely organized and interesting site.
As we noted yesterday, journalism—even its most prominent avatars—is fading away like the Cheshire cat. Money Beagle left a winsome comment to that post, in which he remarks,
I guess great blogs like yours and mine will eventually have to save the day. 🙂
Can’t let that one lay! It’s a broad concept that raises all sorts of questions and issues. I was about to respond in the comments field but found myself going on at post length. So:
@ Money Beagle: Eventually, something vaguely like that is about what will happen. It’s not a good development, because…
First, there’s no organized way to get whatever news or newsoid we produce to a coherent audience. Audience is ultimately what matters.
Second, we have no editors! Reporters need editors for a variety of reasons, all of which apply to bloggers. In the absence of editorial guidance, discipline, and help, we’re not really doing journalism.
Third, we have no real, widely accepted code of journalistic or bloggerish ethics. While reporters often stray from the SPJ code, we have no code at all. At least journalists try.
Fourth, bloggers do not have funds for investigative journalism, the single most important function of the Fourth Estate.
Money, of course, is at the root of print journalism’s troubles. What I’d like to see is a combination of public and nonprofit funding similar to what supports PBS and NPR, only modified for the needs of print magazines and newspapers. Publications would continue to run as many ads as they could get, but advertising revenue would be supplemented by foundations.
Donations to journalistic foundations would be tax-deductible, whether or not the groups were government or, strictly speaking, charitable entities. This policy would be put in place because of the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate to the continuing education of voters, to the health and safety of the public, and to the survival of a free society. As a more or less democratic republic, we can’t afford to lose high-quality journalistic enterprises. Just as donations to schools are deductible, so support of journalism would be deductible, for much the same reasons.
For bloggers to morph into true journalists—not Play-Nooz yappers but real journalists of the sort you find at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker—we would have to organize into networks that incorporate the best organizational features of large print publications and adapt those features to a diffuse online operating model. We would need training to understand the principles of investigative journalism, political and science writing, community journalism, and basic ethics. We would need a centralized set of editors who could establish an overall mission and keep the enterprise moving coherently according to that mission, assign bloggers to “beats,” assign specific stories and projects, and oversee accuracy, quality, and integrity. We would need a master site with a layout that would effectively direct readers to content. And we would need a lot of money, which means we would need ad agents and a system of advertising that generates serious revenue. Each blogger’s site or contribution to the larger site would have to earn enough for her or him to make a living.
Few of us earn enough from blogging to live, even modestly. Those individuals who do are, by and large, not journalists. Whatever it is you can say they’re doing, it isn’t journalism.
Most of the heavy-hitting journalists in this country today are products of heavy-hitting schools—many have degrees from the Ivy Leagues. Although some highly educated and sophisticated writers reside in the blogosphere, they’re not organized and few earn enough from blogging to justify the cost of that sort of training. In a word, they have paying day jobs. If blogging is to replace print journalism, it will have to generate enough money to support more than just a few writers—full-time, not as hobbyists.
Image:
Henry Louis Stephens, “Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight”
The painting is said to represent a man reading the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the paper
Public domain, U.S. Library of Congress
From Wikipedia Commons
I’d stopped secreting a copyright notice in the body copy of my posts, because the splogging of my site had slowed down enough to make that not worth the trouble. Besides, most of these chuckleheads simply steal the first few words and then insert a link back to my site, which tends to up one’s page rank, stupidly enough.
But here’s a real, unvarnished word thief: http://johnjtarthur.net
This low-life is stealing my articles and publishing them as his own, amid garlands of advertising. It’s now more than just a matter of principle: he’s stealing revenue that I sorely need because of the coming layoff.
Will you please go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the thefts shown at these URLs:
On some of these, he’s contrived to make the pingbacks go to older posts that have nothing to do with the post he stole, so obviously he knows he’s violating my copyright and AdSense policy and is trying to hide it.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the johntarther.net homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URLs of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put those into the box to report the specific offense.
If you would like to report the specific FaM pages he has ripped off, they are as follows:
Thanks for your help. AdSense may send you a reply saying you have to jump through other hoops, but I’ve been told that Google actually will act on complaints sent through their report-a-violation site without correspondents having to take further action.
These have little or nothing to do with personal finance, but… Here are two blogs you might enjoy.
One is by my friend Judy Galbraith, who teaches journalism at Paradise Valley Community College and writes affectingly about subjects ranging from her obvious professional commitment to censorship, politics, and the good life.
And not to be missed is Let’s Call Him Bob, a hilarious journal of my pal VickyC’s rambunctious dating life. This promises to get more and more amazing as it grows!
