I've found there are three major components to my data hoarding hobby.
- Hardware: including cheap deal acquisition, configuration, and maintenance
- Data acquisition: including hunting/exploring/researching interesting things and then finding efficient ways to obtain and digitize them
- Curation: organizing all the data and making it easy to find and enjoyable or meaningful to access
My time split currently is about 10% hardware / 60% data acquisition / 30 % curation. Of these, I find data acquisition to probably be the most stimulating and ejoyable part, and curation to often be tedious but also the most important and satisfying part once it starts coming together. Curation also tends to lead towards researching and uncovering more data to acquire, and then that sort of becomes an ever expanding loop.
Sometimes though I feel I need to reduce the amount of time I spend on data acquisition so I can focus on curation and actually putting the data to good use, as the ever mounting backlog of unorganized hordes far outpaces my ability to curate them meaningfully. What good is the data if it is never organized in an accessible manner or ever used? It can be difficult psychologically though because sometimes I get to thinking "what if it disappears?" and then I get distracted back into acquisition mode and lose focus on my curation goals.
Anyways, I was just curious if others here ponder this kind of stuff and maybe have different ways of thinking or going about things.