There was a good... 7 month period there where I was rather bored at work. The ongoing budget crisis (now abating somewhat, but that's now one job ago) meant that our usual pace of new projects had come to a halt and we were pretty much doing nothing but fire-watch and deploying home-grown services.
Firewatch, as we all know, is the act of waiting patiently for something to go wrong so we can fix it. Plenty of time to do other things, such as update documentation, blog, build scripts to improve automation, and answer all the questions on ServerFault. Firewatch was very good to my rep here.
Now I have a new job, and am significantly less bored. Also, I'm a moderator now which detracts from my answering-time. And yet in the not-quite-2 years I've had the diamond I racked up over 20,000 points. How? Over breakfast (like now), evenings, weekends, and the occasional break at work when I should be doing something I don't want to do.
By now I'd gotten into the habit of answering questions. I knew what a good answer looks like, know what kind of research needs to go into them, and importantly, how to write a good-looking answer. I even asked a few questions! This experience made the few answers I was able to get in end up earning quite a bit.
It doesn't take a lot to get to high rep quickly. Earning 100 points a day, half the rep cap, gives you 700 points in a week. This is enough to get you into the top 5 earners for a week. 100 points can be 15 answers, or it can be just the right 2. Keep that up for a few months and you'll be over 10K fairly quickly.
