What I Would Do If I Weren’t Blogging

I have a pretty good idea of what I would do with the 2-3 hours a day I spend blogging. I follow Pollard’s Law: I do what I must, then I do what’s easy, and then I do what’s fun. Blogging to me is easy and fun, and is only a ‘must’ to the extent that if I stopped now, most of the attention I get for my ideas would be lost, and I would lose the self-discipline of thinking about what’s important to me for a couple of hours each day.

I have reached the stage where there are probably no other ‘musts’ that I would immediately start (or resume) doing if I stopped blogging. I have learned to say no, and to train people not to expect me to consider as urgent the things that they consider urgent. So there are many fewer urgent, unimportant tasks in my day than there used to be. If I had stopped blogging a couple of years ago, those urgent unimportant things that used to preoccupy most of my waking hours would have quickly filled the time void. Now, I think, I would be looking for other non-urgent important things to do instead, if I gave up my time-consuming hobby. Though, according to Pollard’s Law, they would probably be the easy, fun, important things, rather than necessarily the most important things.

Here’s a list of what I might do, and what I probably wouldn’t do, showing how urgent, easy, fun, and important each alternative is (to me). I’ve sorted them by Pollard’s Law:
 

Notes:
1. I’d like to believe what I’m doing on the blog is somewhat important.
2. I’m picky. It’s hard to find music I really like and haven’t heard too often.
3. Actually doing the work (which would involve helping Natural Enterprises) will be fun. Finding the sponsorship to get it off the ground will just be hard work.
4. This would be very hard; the stress might kill me, or someone else. Importance would be higher if there weren’t a steady stream of volunteers willing to take this on (I salute them).
 
Note that the importance of these activities has absolutely no bearing on their rank in the list. And if any of these items (or something else) rose to a high level of urgency (e.g. for #8 – if I found a lost animal on my doorstep and couldn’t find the owner; or for #11 – if a local environmental crisis occurred) it would immediately rise to the top of the list, even displacing blogging. We are programmed to look after the needs of the moment.

What’s worse, as long as something higher up in the list doesn’t become harder (e.g. #4 – when the power goes off, you can’t watch TV or blog), it’s unlikely we will ever get to the things lower on the list. Pollard’s Law doesn’t permit us to be what we aren’t and do what we don’t have to do but perhaps should (i.e. important things), unless they’re easy or at least fun, and only then after we’ve put the urgent tasks behind us.

In fact, all of the 21-22 non-blogging hours of my day (and most people’s days) are consumed with urgent things, our daily ‘musts’: working for a living (10.5 hours including getting ready and commuting), sleeping (7.5 hours), eating, exercise, chores and the minimal necessary social activity (combined 3-4 hours). On the weekend, other chores and family ‘obligations’ (a euphemism for ‘musts’ even when they’re also easy or fun) fill much of the work void. But on the weekends we might at last dip down to some of the medium urgency tasks and even the low-urgency easy tasks (choosing, perversely, the easy ones over the more difficult fun ones, because who has the energy left for the latter?)

There’s no point feeling guilty about this, or beating yourself up for your ‘choices’ and procrastination. You can’t fight the Law. You have nochoice. We do what we must.

Now you know why I blog. What’s your excuse?