My Brain has a Word Limit

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For the past couple of weeks I’ve taken note of how long it takes me to get bored of an activity that involves reading.

1000 words. That’s my personal cutoff.

1000 words of a book. 1000 words of a blog post (or two). Even when I’m reading twitter, I’ll get bored after around 1000 words worth of tweets (unless I get to the point where I start seeing tweets I’ve already read, which happens often because I’m a twitter completionist that way).

When I’m writing, my personal cutoff is around 300 words. The first 300 come easy, after that it becomes excruciating for about 600 words, and then once I’m at 900 there’s no telling whether I’ll stop at 1000 words or get into a flow state and get to 3000 words of writing in one sitting.

A personal record of me getting carried away with writing (journaling) is 10,000 words.