An article in the Sunday New York Times is getting a lot of play in bloggyland this week – In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. The gist is that a few prominent bloggers recently suffered heart attacks, and the culprit could be the never-ending stress cycle created by blogging, which just might kill you.
My first reaction was: come on, New York Times, is there really a story here?
Any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for long hours obsessively watching any kind of information leads to high stress and little physical movement. Is blogging different from day trading, online gambling, or even traditional journalism? I bet stress has taken its toll in those professions too. Or is it just that blogging is a hot topic, so you combine blogging with regular work stress, hit “enter” and you’ve got a story with legs? (Not to mention that some blogs aren’t exactly on the stress program, like the once-a-week-if-that-often Becker-Posner Blog, one of my faves.)
Yet the more I mull it over, the more I think the Times is onto something: the blogosphere does seem to pull successful bloggers toward obsessiveness and high-stress behavior.
In our network (and in the blogosphere in general), the most successful blogs are ones that post frequently and also cover the new developments in their fields. And if you want to keep up with the latest developments, you’re signing up for a never-ending barrage of information — Google Alerts, RSS blog updates, instant messages, emails, comments on your posts. And you might as well get a BlackBerry or an iPhone to ensure you can never escape. As your traffic grows so do the inputs, and the information vortex builds upon itself. The more your attention is dominated by the screen, the more you are apt to sit in one place, maybe eat some potato chips (I think I’m going to go get some right now).
I’m certainly not in a position to give health advice, but what the heck — it’s spring, take a minute to get up and walk around. Go outside and smell the air.
Try to maximize your efficiency. Some bloggers collaborate with others to cut down the work, others make sure to include good search engine optimization as a way of getting more for less.
You’ll also find lots of good tips for work-life balance out there on the Web, and the “getting things done” mavens are full of tips for making your workday (and night) more efficient (like checking your email once an hour instead of every 10 seconds).
Of course, you also can just live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful blog.
Original post by Tim
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