How I find this rubbish (and the time to post it)

A lot of readers – both casual readers who I know in real life, and fellow bloggers, have made comments on my seemingly inhuman ability to track down the stupid stuff I post here. And almost as many wonder how I find the time.

I have been umming and ahhing about sharing my “secret” with the world. But today, Jeff, speculated that I have invented some sort of time travelling device just so that I can surf the Internet.

It’s time to come clean. Here’s the method to my madness.

1. I try to write one or two substantive posts a day in my main page part – and I try to cover off each category in a week (including a little bit of whatever is going on around me in day to day life. These bits are easy. I don’t have to go looking.
2. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs in each category I write about (I have 349 subscriptions in Google Reader).
3. Each morning I skim through them as quickly as I can – there are usually about 600 posts when I log in before heading off to work. I read all the posts by people in full, skim the gadgets, bookmarking aggregators and the “how to” blogs I subscribe to looking for eligible blog fodder.
4. When I see a post I like, that I don’t want to rewrite substantively, I share it.
5. When I see something I want to post I “star” it.
6. When I have a spare moment I go through my starred pile and post them. Posts in the curiosities column take me about five minutes. I have 207 posts in the queue. You can see what’s “coming up” on my Starred Items page.
7. I visit the blogs of people who comment regularly, or who I know, and keep up with discussions because you never know when someone’s going to say something blogworthy.

During work hours I’ll keep my Google Reader open for down time, I have my gmail open all day (and get emails when people comment), and I keep Windows Live Writer open to work on the longer posts when I’m on the phone or waiting for a meeting.