Reading is dangerous

For a writer, that is. I am a nut for time management (and GTD), and one of my core strategies is a “pie chart of priorities” — so, for example, I spend about 20% of each work day writing. A weird lesson I’ve learned is that it’s a bad idea to devote much more than a pitiful 2% of my work day to reading (research reading, for work). Why?

Because every 5 minutes of reading anything good generates a good half hour in spin-off writing tasks! Quote mining alone takes about three times longer than reading, and that’s the bare minimum I want to do with anything good I’ve read. If I want to put it in my bibliography, summarize it, cite it in ten places, share it on Facebook and Twitter and G+ and here … the ratio can soar as high as 50:1 pretty easily!