The corporate world employs a concept known as zero based budgeting. You cannot simply take the past year’s expenditures, add an incremental dollar amount to accommodate newly costed programs, and throw in an allowance for annual inflation, and call that your budget.

Instead, each year you are required to revisit each budgeted expenditure and you must fully re-justify the associated costs. I did this with my training budgets and, while it is a significant amount of work, it also constitutes an excellent discipline. It forces you to investigate each proposed expenditure and determine its current value to the corporation.

I want to utilize a similar discipline in regard to the tasks that I perform, and the time budget required by each task grouping. A few meetings ago, Dr H suggested I do this. I commenced this activity, but was sidetracked by a week of clinical visits.

One activity that consumes a large amount of my time is blogging. Blogging is a novel form of literature. It commenced 14 years ago as a personal account of one’s day to day activity – sort of an enhanced Twitter, one without the 140 character limit, but still relatively fast and quick in comparison to more formal modes of text creation such as the essay.

My blogging activity tends to be an all day affair. It is now 1900 and, with the exception of a one hour nap, and perhaps another hour devoted to meals, most of my day has been spent writing, or researching, blog posts. Blogging therefore represents a significant part of my daily time budget.

The questions I need to answer: Is blogging a good use of my time? Or is it some form of misguided vanity project, perhaps a form of medical narcissism? [Back when Colin first critiqued this blog effort I had the thought that my blog activity was a form of overly self-referential navel gazing (SRNG). I tried to move the focus to other topics but found this to be difficult or impossible to achieve until relatively recently.]

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It is the morning of the next day. I have been awake for an hour now and have spent the time lying in bed, trying to assess this blog post, and discover why it is causing me so much difficulty. Work on this post started over two weeks ago and I have a growing thicket of notes on this topic but appear unable to pull any order from them. I am going to abandon cohesive narrative for a moment and just throw text at the wall and see what sticks and makes sense.

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• My experience is that I am slow
• That I have difficulty coming to grips with things (elements, constructs)
• That the act of writing helps me to elicit constructs and elements and commit them to the page
• That once committed to the page, I then seem to be able to extend those constructs and elements, or manipulate them further and arrive at conclusions, or hypotheses, which I can attempt to test in real life or use as thinking models. I appear to be working to populate my mind with “thinking models” (external aids) both as an external memory source and as a constructive element in what I term “external cognition.”

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• That the blog keeps me active in some way
• That it makes cognitive demands on me that are not met in any other way. So it forestalls atrophy
• I do not know how to measure this but my subjective sense is that the blog has been of some assistance in addressing topics
• Blogging has not helped in regard to facilitating the reading of complex texts. No apparent change noted
• Blogging has resulted in some minimal increase in writing speed. But this is open to question. There was no noticeable improvement in my ability to write when it came to writing TBI Proposal outreach letters. These were much harder to write than a blog post. There does not appear to be any transfer of the skills developed in posting on the blog to the skill requirements associated with the outreach communications
• Blogging has not resulted in a decline in error rate. I still end up finding major errors in prior posts despite exhaustive proof reading
• Blogging does serve as an assist when I am down. It is a refuge for attempting to work things out
• The blog does impose formal demands. My other note taking, record keeping, is informal. Which is to say sloppy, or highly tolerant of bad grammar, spelling, and construction. This blog has no audience but I am attending to it as if it had an audience and I am attempting to “publish” a quality “product.”
• The blog does not take time away from other activities. I have dropped the blog for extended periods when I have other time consuming tasks on my plate
• Not sure why it is that I feel so suddenly defensive about the blog. I think part of it goes back to Colin’s critique which, if I understand it correctly, was that the blog was a form of narcissistic adventure [SRNG]
• Some of my other projects were clearly beyond my abilities. The blog appears to be within my present capacity

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The SRNG form was repellent to me. It had the quality of describing every broken toe nail and exploring that injury in depth. I seemed to spend a great deal of time expressing how down, or depressed, I felt.

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There was a battle between accuracy in description, and the blog as a violation of personal space. There were questions about the value of the SRNG form as a narrative form which held reader interest. In trying to upgrade, or maintain, my work skills, I have been studying SEO and similar materials addressing the topicality of written content, or the ability to attract readers. The upshot appears to be that no one wants to read a downer blog in which every second sentence is “I am depressed.”

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But how does one write a personal account without mention of depression if one is in fact experiencing depression? Would this not be an attempt to deceive the reader? Deceive oneself? The idea feels false. In practise, I find it impossible to write from a Shirley Temple, “all is happiness” perspective. What I have done is jettison the notion of an audience (there is none) and try to accurately reflect my day to day experience, both good and bad.

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The above decision with regard to accuracy in reporting feels positive and I am glad I made that decision. From statistical data I have found on the web, it is apparent that there are significant numbers of people who suffer from mTBI. It is also known that one of the characteristics of mTBI is chronic depression. It is known that mTBI victims are predisposed toward suicide, substance abuse and social exclusion (call this the S3 problem). The number of Canadian mTBI victims is estimated as being one injury every 3 minutes, or 465 people per day, or 166,455 victims per year. Each of these individuals will likely experience S3 syndrome. It strikes me as extremely dishonest to pretend that these individuals are living a Mary Poppins experience and singing happily about their future prospects.

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The above statistics are for brain injury associated with trauma. This number includes injuries due to motor vehicle accidents, falls, sports related trauma, and assault. Brain injury may also result from other causes: stroke, aneurysm, anoxic events, tumours, infections, toxins, surgical procedures, drugs and alcohol, electrocutions, arterial venus malformations. Including these non-traumatic causes results in a doubling of the incidence rate such that close to 4% of the entire population lives with a brain injury. This implies there are an estimated 1.400,000 persons in Canada who are not gaily tap dancing, or singing in sun drenched mountain top meadows.

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This post is for the 1,400,000 who cannot speak for themselves.