Dec. 10: Way too much time

 I have spent an extraordinary amount of time this week covering South Glengarry's budget meeting, which took place last Friday. The meeting was uploaded to YouTube the next day and I got to follow nearly eight hours of riveting discussion on levies and bridges and tax rates.

Don't get me wrong. The budget is an important meeting but I challenge anyone to sit through eight hours of number crunching and not lose focus at least once. My job, as a journalist, is to distill that meeting to its essentials and report on it in a way that is clear and informative.

Still, reporting on budgets is my least favourite part of my job. There are three of them that I have to cover and they all take place around this time of year. Thank God that North Glengarry is waiting until January. I will have four weeks off.

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Around this time last year, I wrote about a new writing device that enables writers to focus on writing without the distractions that modern day writing devices have. My writing machine is also my social media machine. I cannot go back to typewriters. I long for the late 90s, when the Internet was the stuff of science fiction, when I could sequester myself in a room with WordPerfect 6.0 and come out with 20 pages of material.

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There is the 10,000 hour rule, which states that if you want to get really good at something, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it.

I wonder how many of us are really good at doom scrolling. 


 

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