In praise of menial tasks.

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It's those little tweaks, the ones that would probably go unnoticed by any readers, the ones that we tell ourselves we'll take a minute to correct and then twenty minutes later are infuriated over but still tell ourselves "one more try", that I like the best. They seem to be the best suited to a computerized environment where we can tinker without getting up from our desks. And without a doubt a good part of their attraction to us stems from the fact that while we work on them we're not taking care of more important tasks.

Without a doubt, in the two years since I last referred to Milo's encounter with the Terrible Trivium in Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, I've paid more than a handful of visits to him. That previous reference focused on how our constant web searches keep us from actually doing something with the information that we find. This time it's not information that keeps us from doing something constructive, but the end result is the same.

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Go to: A different sort of busy, or
Go to: Busy work, or
Go to: Me and HTML