Today I took part in something called the Pedal Poll, which is a countrywide initiative to count how many people are biking, walking, driving, or using a motorized vehicle across a specific time and place. I counted 993 cyclists in the span of 2 hours. I think I would have gotten that other 7 to get over 1000 if I hadn't accidentally closed the app and had to restart it.

This is a question I've been thinking about. In fact, I thought about it so much for a few days, I considered interviewing people (lately, I've been enjoying interviewing people, in person).

What if I interviewed 100 people and asked them what they wished they had learned in school? What if those people were of all different ages? What if some of them were still in school?

I've been considering adding more inefficiency in my life. It's time I embraced it. Instead of trying to be a finely tuned, get-things-done-machine, I could be a bit more human and exist between my tasks.

Our careers shape our lives. Being a programmer for the last 10 years has shaped my life. Primarily, it has lured me into optimizing my personal life: Creative projects. Personal admin. Relationships. Content. Time. Time is one of those things that I try to optimize. Only in the last few years have I really begun to question the driving force behind that engine.

Instead, some possible useful inefficiencies I could explore:

• Reading more books.
• Using my imagination.
• Sitting with my eyes closed.
• Working on only one project at a time, until it's finished.
• Eating; not Eating & Reading.
• Biking without music.

How long can I sustain this? How long before the batteroids come for me — the infamous, invisible creatures of lore, hell-bent on amping one up with the fuel of a thousand voltaic cells?

Surely it goes against the natural order of things; to be down by the river, sitting, resting, dreaming, an intermittent wind passing through me.

Recently I cooked up a little project where I interviewed a few of my friends and put it together into a short video. Watching the footage back, I realized that they are all more to-the-point than me. I'm mostly okay with that, but this also isn't the first time that I've been confronted with my long-windedness. This is also not the first time that I've thought, hey, I'd like to be able to say what I'm thinking and it not take half an hour.

What does it take to be more brief? Why is it important to me? And why has it been hard before?

Last week I finished my fourth piece for Loud World Quiet Hour.