With A Brief History of Timekeeping moving into the production pipeline and the end of my directorship at work, I have the opportunity to reorganize a bit of my time, and I’ve been trying to get back into writing more. This includes trying to do more blog posts about more serious topics, which means I need to think of topics for those posts.
Yesterday, I had a great idea for a post about higher education and politics. I think that was it, anyway. Maybe it was just one of those and not the other? I don’t know any more, because in addition to having a blog, I have a dog, and I thought of the idea just as it was time for him to get his morning walk. And during the course of the walk, I completely lost whatever my great idea was.
The reason for this is podcasts. I started listening to a bunch of podcasts several years ago as something to do while sitting in one or the other of the kids’ bedrooms waiting for them to fall asleep, but that quickly expanded to be a thing that I do while walking the dog, and while running errands in the car. And on the whole, I think it’s been a positive development– I’ve found some smart and funny commentators on current events and pop culture, so I’ve gotten some good laughs and a bit of edification out of the deal.
One negative feature, though, is that I’m rarely without somebody else’s voice in my ear. That’s fine when the goal is either information transfer or pleasant diversion, but it’s actually terrible for thinking. There’s a reason why I don’t listen to podcasts while writing or doing class prep, after all– if I pay enough attention to the podcast to understand what they’re saying, I don’t have enough spare processing capacity to do the actual task at hand.
And that’s what happened yesterday. I had an idea for a blog post that I thought was really promising, but when I set out with the dog, I spent the next half-hour listening to somebody else’s thoughts. Which left no real room for… whatever it was I had wanted to write about. This isn’t to say that the podcast in question was Bad, mind– I enjoyed it quite a bit, and it had some useful analysis of current events. But paying attention to that distracted me from my own idea, to the point where I completely forgot whatever the idea was, and ended up writing a thing about sports and academics instead, that wasn’t at all what I was thinking of earlier.
(This is not that unusual an occurrence, by the way, which is why I’m not more upset. I regularly think of great ideas while in the process of doing other things and totally lose them by the time I get to a place where I could even write down what the idea was. They usually come back around sooner or later.)
Anyway, in thinking about what to write this morning, it occurred to me that this is almost certainly a contributing factor to the decline in my blog writing over the last few years. I used to do a lot of pre-writing while walking the dog– turning the general idea over, thinking of some choice sentences, etc.– but podcasts make that much more difficult, in the same way that they make writing and class prep difficult. If I’m paying enough attention to the podcast to follow what they’re saying, I’m not thinking through my own stuff.
It’s a little interesting to consider why podcasts specifically are a problem, especially given that back when I blogged a lot more, I also read a lot more of other people’s blogs. I think it’s two things: first, I read much faster than most people speak, so I could power through a lot of blog posts in the time it takes for one podcast. (Also, let’s be honest, here, a lot of blog writing doesn’t exactly demand (or necessarily reward) close reading…) More important, though, is when it happens– I wasn’t reading blog posts while walking the dog, after all. Podcast listening taken over in time when I otherwise had nothing else to do but think my own thoughts, and filled it in with listening to other people’s thoughts. And that’s bound to have a detrimental effect on my ability to, you know, write actually interesting stuff.
Does that mean I’m going to cut podcasts out of my media diet? Probably not, because I’ve become very attached to some of them. And there are long-ish stretches of time still when I’m not capable of much great thinking– The Pip still wants an adult in his room as he goes to sleep, for example, and my brain is basically cheese at that point in the evening already. Having realized this, though, I’m probably going to switch to listening to music instead during the morning dog walk, particularly when I’ve got (or need to get) an idea for something to write.