The Documents. They Just Keep Coming.

There is a fine art to not losing your mind while doing document review. I have a couple of tactics for getting through my days. The first thing I do is manipulate my document database. First I do the documents in numerical order, which is the order they were loaded into the database. I do about 100 this way, and then I organize them by title, thus showing all the duplicates of the ones I've already done and allowing me to copy/paste and rapidly code away.

I know, thrill a minute.

What really gets me through my days is 1) emails (keep 'em coming!), and 2) internet radio. During the first phase of my day when I have to pay attention to what I'm reading because they want some actual analysis of the documents, I listen to music, because silence just makes me sleepy and depressed. My music provider of choice is Pandora.

I think Pandora wins the award for the internet radio station that takes itself the most seriously. They have worked up this system they call The Music Genome Project where you type in an artist or the title of a song that you like and they proceed to build you a station based on that particular preference. And they have really specific reasons for their selections. For example, I am currently listening to my Pixies radio station. They just played a song by The Raveonettes that they picked "because it features a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, major key tonality and many other similarities [to The Pixies]." You can create multiple stations and so far I have the Pixies station, the Nickel Creek station, the Enya station, the Imogen Heap station, and the "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" (Frank Sinatra version) station.

While I am doing duplicates and can actually use my brain for something else, I like to listen to NPR podcasts and the archives of This American Life. On NPR I've been bouncing back and forth between the archived shows of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and the Holiday stories from this and past years.

And that's how I spend 8-10 hours of my days. I need a real job.