The Happy Moron

Call it quantum, if you like.

Back when I measured my week’s worth of time, I kept a little notebook in my pocket. Coil notebooks are handy – if you have a short little pencil stub it fits nicely within the coil .

Having pencil and paper everywhere is a good thing.

I doubt I filled more than a doublesided sheet per day. It wasn’t a lot of writing. But it was a fair amount of typing up. About an hour of my day was hijacked by measurement overhead.

This is self destructive, intrusive, measurement; measuring my day in some way altered it. The measurements were corrupted by the act of measuring.

So my time measurements were flawed; this highlights a bigger problem.

Time is a relatively poor approximation of what I really wanted to measure that week.

A far better indicator would have been thought. I would love to have a breakdown of my thought-space for a week. My physical activity is some indicator of where my life is spent, but where my mind wanders is a far more truthful reflection of where I am at a given moment.

The problem, is that if measuring physical activity is marginally self-destructive, attempting to measure thought is far, far worse.

Even measuring my physical activities encroached severely on my thinking; I can’t imagine what trying to track my thinking would do.

Chances are, I can’t do it. Chances are, that’s a good thing, because it smacks a trifle obsessive to me.