MJDAOG

I probably spend an average of 5-6 hours a day reading.  The thing is, I never have time to read any of the books on my desk- just emails, websites, magazines, etc. When I'm reading a book it's easy to track my progress and comprehend the 'size' of the information I'm consuming, but what about tracking the progress of your information intake when it's fragmented across all media? 

That concept really sparked my interest, so yesterday I decided to try and record my reading, across all media.  My method was sloppy at best- I just copy/pasted everything I read online into a running word document, and then took notes to estimate my offline reading.  It's probably no more than a ballpark estimation, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.

Words read:
Email- 7,185
Websites- 46,006
Offline- ~ 20,000
TOTAL- ~ 73,191

If you apply that to an average book that might have 12 words per line and 35 lines per page, that's 420 words per page, meaning I read the equivelant of 174 pages of an average book yesterday.  And that only takes into account complete sentences... I wonder how much more information I 'consume' when advertising, graphics, music, video, and face to face conversations are considered.  It's overwhelming... the human brain really is an amazing thing to make sense of it all.