What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it?
I get over 200 emails each day across three different email accounts. Going through each one of them takes up a good bit of time – around a couple of hours.
I recently discovered that my spam box is filled with messages and a quick glance showed me that not everything is spam; so, it looks like I may be spending more time going through emails and then figuring out how to make sure everything goes through the inbox to hopefully save a little bit of time.
But even that doesn’t compare to the amount of time I spend turning the emails I keep into articles. Between writing articles from emails and cre
ating original copy runs into at least four hours a day. And on race days, I can spend eight and nine hours a day!
Race weekends – and the NASCAR season is around nine months long – can get very hectic. There are three different racing series in NASCAR – the Craftsman Truck Series, the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, and the Cup Series – with at least two of them racing each weekend. While weather can play havoc with the schedules and cause delays that make a long day seem to last forever; each series will sometimes have a practice session – depending on the track – and always a qualifying session and the race itself.
In recent years, NASCAR has consolidated the weekend schedule which means on a triple header weekend, all three series get crammed into two days with the Cup Series race on the third day.
Recently a Saturday started at 9am and ran for about 10 hours! Talk about a long day! And of course, I am on my word processing program the entire time…and my browser program keeping track of lineups and so forth.
Do I feel bad about the time I spend???
No.
Spending the amount of time I do each day on the computer is a big part of my job. Long gone are the days when stories were written out and then typed up for someone else to set into print.
When I conduct an interview, I still write the article by hand and then type it up in Word myself before I post it. Writing a story by hand still helps to generate my creativity. It’s like the thoughts run out my head, down my arm and out the pen onto the paper. It is much easier to create and not worry about spelling and such; than typing and thinking at the same time.
I once talked with my dad about retiring, but every time I think about it, I just can’t do it. My dad told me that I can’t because it is part of who I am.