• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, May 1, 2009

Freelance writer and author of this month's cover story

6:32 a.m. Get out of bed. Curse father for passing along inability-to-sleep-past-6:45-even-when-hungover genes.

6:33 a.m. Complete harrowing 13-step commute to work station. Flick computer open. Pull up separate Web browsers for personal and work email addresses, which are kept open all day and obsessively re-checked every 19 seconds.

6:36 a.m. Open browser No. 3 for general research and procrastinatory purposes. Start off by reading the headlines up and down my Yahoo home page, then flip over to my fantasy hoops league. Shake a frustrated fist at the Big Guy/Gal above for having felled Kevin Durant with a sprained ankle three days after I traded for him.

6:42 a.m. Head loo-ward to attend to an urgent matter of personal hygiene. Page through Runner's World while detained.

6:47 a.m. Back to the 'puter and the New York Times online. Sports first, then the front page and a scan of the "most read" list. Thanks, NYT, for throwing everything online for free and allowing me to save some cash by canceling my subscription. And we wonder why the media business is cratering?

7:00 a.m. Quick check of the local headlines on NY1, then a flip over to the Weather Channel at precisely eight minutes after the hour. Apparently I need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

7:11 a.m. More general catch-up-ish-ness: The LOHUD Yankees blog, fivethirtyeight.com, The Consumerist, Backstreets: the Springsteen RMAS message board, Woot, Doonesbury, USA Today's Pop Candy.

7:30 a.m. Work time. Spend the next three hours attempting to arrange nouns and verbs in coherent working order and responding to email as it arrives. Five or six breaks when the phone rings.

10:42 a.m. Head-clearing run in the park, accompanied by The Hold Steady on the iPod Shuffle at 225 decibels.

11:37 a.m. Back at computer, with ice packs on knees. Quick glance through the daily "I Want Media" newsletter, skipping every headline that portends the end of my chosen profession. That is to say: all of them.

12:25 p.m. Break for lunch. There's music on the stereo (a, uh, creatively obtained pre-release copy of the new U2 record, which is dreadful) and a tabloid on the table (the New York Daily News, which I rationalize as less intellectually reprehensible than the New York Post) to keep me company while I'm stuffing my maw with peanut butter. Peanut butter rules.

1:10 p.m. Wipe mouth. Brush teeth. Do one of the NYT crossword puzzles that dad has been passing along. For the 143rd time this day, it dawns on me that I'm not very smart.

1:32 p.m. More worky-work. More phone calls. But first, my early-afternoon indulgence when the Baseball Prospectus daily e-newsletter arrives. I realize that Baseball Prospectus is an inanimate text entity, but I'd still like to marry it.

3:03 p.m. A mid-afternoon Snapple break, with quick flips back to the NYT (for the afternoon's requisite dose of end-of-days business news) and Deadspin (for the whimsical counterbalance).

5:27 p.m. The start of a text-message flurry about the evening's plans. Turns out we'll be staying in and acting slothlike.

6:30 p.m. Mandatory daily close-the-computer time, because I lose my mind if I stare at a screen for more than 10 hours in a given day.

6:42 p.m. Reno 911 and Scrubs reruns while waiting for the Missus to arrive. Spend commercial breaks flipping over to ESPNews, mostly for its bottom-screen ticker.

7:35 p.m. Dinner. Actual human interaction. No media. Ignore phone and text-message buzzes.

9:02 p.m. Absent-mindedly peruse the stack of magazines on the coffee table: New York, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated. Read another team entry in the Baseball Prospectus annual and a few more pages of Watchmen.

10:01 p.m. Settle into the couch with the remote. Lotsa flipping around before we settle on one of VH-1 Classic's Rock Docs. This one talks about music and drugs, or something. I'm half-asleep within minutes.