Listen to this post: You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher. Although most days are the same, they are a little different. My kids have returned to school, and so my summer routine of waking up “when I wake up” and riding my 8 miles to work along the scenic San Tomas Aquinas trail (which follows a half-dry canal) has changed a bit. I now ride my kids to school and then ride on to work. My two youngest (6 and 9) often glide along on roller skates while holding onto the back of a bike child carrier that I pull. My older two kids get themselves to school by bike and foot. My wife is an early riser who leaves while it’s still dark and heads up to the “Dish” in Palo Alto to walk along a trail that is so popular, if you don’t get there before 7am, there is not a single place to park for what seems like miles. The extra ride to school adds another 4 miles to my route, which puts my daily biking round trip at about 20 miles. When I also add in a few games of some post-work basketball, all the exercise can seriously wear me out. (Unfortunately, I still manage to eat enough calories to more than enough compensate for all the calories I’m burning.) The fatigue from riding sometimes carries over into a sense of fatigue about endless documentation tasks. I’m still trying to follow Tim Ferris’ advice to focus on the highest two priority items first thing in the day and block out everything else. Sadly, I’m lucky if I get one of the two items finished. Even if I do finish it, I usually can’t publish the documentation I write until I can get the right subject matter expert to review and sign off on the content – a process that can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week. It would be more encouraging if I could see the to-do items decreasing little by little, but I think the reverse trend is happening. For every item I knock off my list, two more get added (both for tasks at work and at home). Sometimes I feel like I’m slowly sinking, and as much as I try to conquer the documentation mountain, it just keeps rising higher and higher in the sky. I dream about a day when I’ll have marked every task as “Resolved,” like having reached a state of Inbox Zero. In this state, I’ll tackle incoming items with such a responsive velocity that those who requested the update would be surprised at how quickly I turned it around, like when you find that someone has responded to your email just seconds after you sent it. It crossed my mind today that perhaps instead of writing documentation myself, the only way to truly scale and conquer this documentation mountain is to switch from author to curator. A marketer who works near me noted with glee how she already has four posts she is publishing on the company blog this week. Did you write them all yourself? I asked, ready to be impressed. No, she said, teams reached out to me with the content. I’m not sure I would be entirely satisfied being a content curator instead of an author. Writing is my sweet spot, and where I perform my best (except for maybe setting up authoring tools). But no doubt a hybrid role of author/curator is essential to survive. While the documentation tasks keep building, I’m also trying to build up my technical knowledge of Android and the products I write about. There’s a lot to building streaming media apps – it isn’t something one learns in a few weeks. What’s more, the developer audience is at such a higher technical level than I’m at, my documentation has to hit on the questions and gaps of knowledge they will run into, not just me. I just finished editing a document about 4K Ultra HD media that has so many details about refresh rates, color formats, codecs, and other specifications that I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can consume this information as easy as reading a morning newspaper. I try to get into work a bit early to push through some tech tutorials in the morning and