The New York Times ran an article today about bloggers who were working themselves to death and how this becoming part of a rising trend. While I do agree that the always-on, instant news source culture that has been created by the new blog community has created some problems, specifically the accuracy of the “reporting.” It think Matt Richtel gets it wrong.
The article paints the picture of an epidemic, bloggers keeling over left-and-right, but this is no different than professional journalists. As Matt writes, all of these limit-pushing activities are self imposed.
The New York Times wrote an article on November 11, 2007, interviewing and discussing the luminaries of the tech world including, Marc Andreessen, Jason Hoffman, and Jason DeFillippo, founder of Metroblogging Global Blog Network, a blogging network just like Gawker or Weblogs, Inc. The topic of the article was the low information diet as prescribed by Tim Ferriss in the 4 Hour Work Week. This is another self imposed lifestyle, one that all of the interviewees say has been a positive one.
This is the problem with the article. It makes it sound like blogging will kill you, but the sad truth is that these people would have worked themselves into an early grave regardless of their profession.
A work/life balance is important, more than ever. Just because the culture and technology is forcing us to be always on and always connected, doesn’t mean we have to buy into that. This is the goal of lifehacking, the goal of GTD, the goal of decluttering: Exerting control over life versus life controlling you.
