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Learning to sleep again

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 1/14/02; 5:16:51 AM
Topic: Learning to sleep again
Msg #: 90 (top msg in thread)
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I've gone home and I'm in bed, writing on the PowerBook via AirPort, winding down after a week that should have ended on Friday but, as often happens, ended on Sunday night instead. No weekend for the weary, but I knew to expect that: it's Macworld Expo time. For those of you who come to my blog via some route other than my work, I'm the publisher of MDJ, the Daily Journal for Serious Macintosh Users. Every day (or every day we can), we publish 8-10 single-spaced pages of ad-free Macintosh news and analysis for subscribers, and Macworld Expo always pushes far more news into our pipe than our staff can take. Since I'm the publisher and everything is my responsibility, I do the most work on it, including writing most of the feature articles. (For reasons that remain historically ambiguous, the official attribution of the obnoxious opinion feature The Weekly Attitudinal remains a mystery, but even editing it is a chore.) This has always been a lean, low-overhead outfit, and one of the problems with that structure is that it's hard to catch up from a time deficit. Just to let you peek behind the curtain a bit, here's how the past week went:
  • Sunday night was our first working night after a two-week holiday hiatus that turned out not to be as much vacation as it should have, since we had some issues to get out during the break. I knew we were going to be late with either news or Product Showcase (our daily roundup of the best new product releases), but thought we'd at least catch one of them. Then Time's Canadian Web site accidentally leaked the exclusive story on Apple's new iMac. Our feature article was analyzing press predictions about what would happen at the show, so given actual news we had to rip it up after midnight and rewrite it to fit the new information. We got the issue out the door about 7AM local time on Monday morning, but Steve Jobs's keynote address started at 11 AM that same morning. I got about 90 minutes of sleep before watching the speech via satellite, taking notes. After that, I went home again and napped for about three hours. I tried to get work done that night, but all I could manage was a little organizing of the news and press releases that were arriving. I had to nap again by 10PM, woke up at 2AM, organized some more, and slept again from about 5AM to 9AM. By that morning, I had slept 12 of the past 24 hours, but I was still tired.
  • I was feeling better by Tuesday morning, but instead of having Tuesday's issue nearly out the door, we'd barely started on it. The biggest priority was coverage of the new iMac, and that's what I got to work on, reading everything I could get my hands on all afternoon and writing about it. Even simple questions proved tough to chase down. For example, is the new iMac's flat-panel display as good as Apple's famed Cinema and Studio displays? The spec sheets told a strange story, measuring the brightness not in lumens but in candle/m^2. After a phone call to a SmartFriend&tm;, we more or less figured out that the units were roughly equivalent to some number of lumens measured from a point source one meter away from the screen over an area of one square meter. More or less. We also figured out that Apple's own specs were wrong for some displays, listing brightness in candelas/m, a nonsensical measurement of brightness (as far as we could tell). After more than an hour or so of figuring, we got to the realization that the new iMac's display is about 16% brighter than Apple's Cinema Display, already noted for its brightness. That's good reporting, I think (and hope), but it was about 100 minutes of work for a paragraph in what turned out to be a six-page story. We got the article done and out the door late Tuesday night, again with no news and no product round-up (there was just no time to cover something like iPhoto with the detail it deserved).
  • On Wednesday, we started the business of catching up on the news, including the news from the first week of the year when we were on hiatus. Sometimes we'll break it into chunks, like last week's and then this week's, because that way we can publish faster. Readers don't like us to drop big stories. Unfortunately, the news had kept evolving over the week -- a story about how Microsoft was facing a hearing in court made no sense when we knew the hearing had already been held. So we started slogging through an Expo's worth of news, and by the end of the day had not caught up. A few hours before we ran out of time for the day, we stopped and turned to the interview we'd conducted with Glenn Anderson, a rather cool guy who had lots of good experience and opinions to pass along, very mind-broadening. We published that late Wednesday night as the Wednesday issue, and with the news about half done, called it another 16-hour day. Justin continued to keep up with and brief products during this time period, but we hadn't yet had time for the next steps (ranking, expanding, cross-referencing, and all the fun stuff that turns a list into a Showcase).
  • On Thursday, we finally got ten days' worth of news finished, producing an article that was full-sized by itself. It took the full day to finish it, though, as it sometimes does when we're a bit behind. Merging older stories into more complete narratives and discarding the newly-irrelevant is more work than doing it on a daily basis, if we had the time.
  • On Friday, we finally gave the Attitudinal its due. Friday was spent sorting, re-reading, organizing, and outlining the dozens of iMac-related articles that had shown up or been sent in over the week, focusing on the ones that you knew didn't make sense but had difficulty explaining why they didn't make sense. That took most of what should have been one day off. Saturday was spent reading up on cognitive dissonance, figuring out if it was really a good explanation for what was going on, and putting the pieces together. By late Saturday night, the Attitudinal had a framework and 2-3 pages. Sunday expanded that to ten full pages, with full analysis of about five separate articles. The "Friday" MDJ shipped very early Monday morning with this Attitudinal as its sole contents.
So what does all that mean?
  • No weekend for me
  • No MWJ publication on Saturday because the pieces for an issue weren't done. They're still not -- no showcase from the week is done. Past experience says that should be a one-day job, so hopefully we'll finish it Monday.
  • It's now the 14th of the month, and since I run the company, I really need to take a day off to do a lot of year-end bookkeeping and bill payment and the like. I would have preferred to have done it on a weekend, but we didn't have a weekend available. That may mean missing an issue of MDJ, but the bills have to be paid.
Personally, the biggest problem for me was the sleep schedule. I drank lots of caffeine (for me, since I usually don't drink any) to stay awake on Monday, and I had to keep drinking it all week long to stay awake at the right times. By the weekend I'd had enough -- when I drink caffeine, I can't sleep more than 3-4 hours at a time and can't stay awake for more than 4-5 hours unless I keep drinking it. I took the hit on the weekend to let it leach out of my system so I'll be able to sleep better now, when I actually get to try. That slowed things down some more, but hey, I was working through the weekend. I think I was entitled. Our next clear organizational priority is hiring a news writer. One of our vast collection of part-time staffers reluctantly filled in writing the news last year while I was at WWDC. With him writing the news and another one writing Showcase, it left me the time to attend the conference and write feature articles and still get issues produced on this very same PowerBook. The amount of Macintosh information has expanded to where that's no longer a luxury; if I'm going to do the kind of writing and exposition that made me want to launch a newsletter in the first place, a news writer is a priority. Our staffer did it very well, but he's not interested in the job. I think we're going to have to shuffle staff priorities to make it work, because the current system of "Matt does everything no one else signs up for" is clearly not working for me, and I'm supposed to be the boss. It's a real Catch-22. To pay what I'd like to pay a news writer, we need more subscriptions to MDJ. We're not getting more subscriptions to MDJ while we publish irregularly, and publishing irregularly is the only defense mechanism I have against burn-out when there's too much work for me to do, as is the case without a news writer. Fun fun fun. I hope to figure out how to break this nasty little circle soon. In the meantime, I think I'm doing good work and doing as much of it as I can, but I'll need a day or two off this month. My next planned vacation is in March, but working 10-15 days in a row usually means I need a day or two off sooner. We'll see how that works out. I started writing this story both to update the blog and to unwind so I could get some sleep, and I think both are done now. If you have a spare news writer you're not using, please send him or her to me via E-mail. Don't use encryption; we're scrambled enough around here as it is.
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