Efficiencies of Scale and Scope

I guess the upside of having read 70 articles in the areas of childhood obesity and the use of nutrition information over the last couple weeks is that I am getting good at summarizing the findings fairly quickly. This is a helpful thing, since I am only about halfway through typing up my notes. Fortunately, having done all of the reading before the writing makes it a lot easier to know what parts are relevant, interesting, confirmatory, need explaining, and so forth, since I have this context to evaluate each paper in. I thought I would simply be writing notes, but I am actually drafting sentences and paragraphs for the actual document as I go, which is nice. (Of course, this is going to result in a gargantuan literature review, which will need to be edited for the paper itself, but I like having so much research to hand.)

It's already clear that for some topics, like the effects of TV viewing on obesity, I have an absolute glut of information, while I will need to do additional search for articles on other topics.

Although I don't always want to be doing this work, and it has its tedious aspects (like everything does), there is still a part of me that can't believe I'm being paid to do it as a job. I mean, seriously, I am getting paid, right? I have been reporting the hours, now show me the money. I could use some.

Really though, it has been, dare I say, basically fun? I feel that I am learning a lot about things that I find interesting and developing / honing skills that will prove useful to me for the next 2 - 50 years of my life (depending on how this whole grad school / academia thing works out). And it's keeping me from completely obsessing on the outcome of my current applications and sundry considerations and concerns about the PhD application process. A person might be willing to pay money for something that does that.