Consuming in 2018

A new year has started and I decided that for 2018 I would start tracking the media I consume. What does this mean? Well I want to know how many books, papers, podcasts and films I consume during the year. The idea of tracking things is not really new. I

1 min read

A new year has started and I decided that for 2018 I would start tracking the media I consume. What does this mean? Well I want to know how many books, papers, podcasts and films I consume during the year. The idea of tracking things is not really new. I got the idea from Jef Claes in 2014 when he talked about it. You can read Jef's original blog post about it. He has been doing it for the last three years.

How will I track everything

I have set up a new github repository named consumed in. For each year I want to track I will create a markdown file. I have already created one for 2018. The idea is that I edit the markdown file each time I consume an item. This is the easiest way to get started. The downside is that analyzing what you have consumed is hard. I am thinking about writing an application, but for now I will go with the repository.

What do I expect?

Well, I listen to a fair amount of podcasts so I predict that list will become long at the end of this year. For the books I really don't know. In 2017 I didn't consume a lot of books. For instance in 2016 I listened to 10 audiobooks compared to the two or three books in 2017. Though the ones I listened to in 2017 were great: Chaos Monkeys and Shoe Dog. My goal for 2018 is to read more.

I am going to rate or review?

The short answer is: no. The long answer is: no because the goal is to capture what I consume during a year. I was playing around with the idea of writing the review in the commit message, but that would lead to long commit messages. The other downside is that it's hard to find which rating you gave to a particular item.

Share This Post