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May 14, 2025

Group decision-making and writing time

We get a free, easy-to-use tool to decide on things anonymously in groups. We learn a little about the time required to read and write a page of technical text.

Hello! I hope your week is going well.

New articles

Announcing Decision Drill

When I needed to pick a board game to play with a few friends, I found a curious lack of available, easy-to-use online services for the purpose. So I made one. This article goes into some of the design considerations, with technical details being a future article.

Full article (3–6 minute read): Announcing Decision Drill

Flashcard of the week

Fermi food:

How long is the entire series of 1–7 Harry Potter books?

I don't know why I picked this as a reference point, but it should be easily relatable.

Just over a million words.

Other useful points of reference relating to this, of course very rough estimations:

  • A tightly-set A4 page is 400 words.
  • Those 400 words take somewhere between 1 and 3 minutes to read. Let's call it 2 minutes.
  • When writing something, I spend about ten times the reading time at the computer writing, editing, and trying ideas. (Of course, ideas and thoughts come to me off computer, but I can't with accuracy estimate how much time I spend on that.)

Thus, one might expect it to take about 80 hours to read all the Harry Potter books – and if they were articles on my blog they would take almost a year of four-hour computer workdays to produce, in addition to brainstorming time spent off the computer.

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