How to Make The Most of Your Content Consumption
Volume 2022, Chapter XI, Number 001
Dear ,
This Week’s One Great Thing: How to Make The Most of Your Content Consumption
Social media, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, is no longer the best channel for intentional content consumption. To me, intentional content is simply high quality content with positive purpose.
Over the years, these channels have become political and ideological battlegrounds instead of their original promise to be the internet’s townhall and online fireplace for discussion. They have become hateful, vitriolic, and polarised. Who was it who said that Twitter has become a very scary place nowadays?
I have stopped expecting places like FB to give me life-giving intentional content. Nowadays, the most viral posts are probably not the best posts to consume - it's probably the most embarrassing one (to one person or to a family) and the most laughable (to you). Virality is achieved by surprise (“it's a prank!”), or by eliciting emotion (oftentimes negative, rarely positive). You'll get the occasional inspiring post that makes your day and it is manna from heaven; but for the most part, I have stayed away from social media as a channel for getting intentional content and reading (or watching).
There’s Tiktok — which is technically not Social Media (in the same way that YouTube is not). As tools go, it IS a really good content consumption tool. Creatives also find it a great content development tool. If you are intentional about following certain people (check out my list below), you can spend a whole hour (or two) watching 10-15 second videos of inspiring and fun content. That’s what a content consumption tool is for and what good tools do. But if you’re not careful, you’ll find that there’s also a lot of garbage on TikTok.
The average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone right now. That’s a lot of time! I know of some people who spend up to 6 or 7 hours on their phone. That’s a lot of time, too much time, actually. This is why it is important to be intentional about what content you let into your life.
The best content is not found on social media, but on websites and digital magazines that are designed for it. Intentional content consumption also allows you to move from content grazing (where consumers use two or more screens at the same time to access separate or unrelated content), and spider webbing (gathering additional information on one device to enhance the primary screen experience), to a more focused experience.
Which brings us to these letters. I send this to your inbox knowing that it may not be the best channel to consume content. Personally, I don't have time to read newsletters from writers I follow when I'm also slogging through work emails and trying to triage my inbox to get to inbox zero. When I go through my email inbox, I’m not on content consumption mode, but on speed reading mode. The inbox was never designed to be a content consumption tool, it was designed to be a communication tool. It's not efficient for content consumption.
But here we are. Social media and email are the channels that are available to us now, just as newspaper and radio (and books) were the channels available to our parents and grandparents then.
So until that content consumption tool is invented, I suggest a workaround. It's called Instapaper. This is the channel where I send content for later (more focused, more intentional) consumption. Instapaper solves a very basic problem for me. You find something to read online but can't read it at that moment. Maybe it's a long read and you don't have the time, maybe you found it while you're at work and want to save it for when you get home, or maybe you're trying to research a topic and you're gathering multiple resources to explore later on. Or maybe it’s even an email (like this newsletter!) that you want to read later when you are more relaxed. Whatever the case, with a browser extension, or the share function on your phone, or the special send-to-Instapaper email address that they give to you, you can send the article to Instapaper. There, the app will automagically turn it into a text-friendly version that you can read even if you lose your internet connection. You can sort your articles into folders, or have them read aloud to you if you prefer listening to them. I love its distraction-free interface. The best part about it is that Instapaper does not care about likes, shares or comments. It is not a social media platform. It is only interested in giving you the best reading experience. It's the best content consumption tool that I have found so far. And I use it every day.
There are other apps like it, so you can choose whatever you like: Pocket, Alfread, or Matter. They're all good.
When we consume content, WHERE and HOW you consume is as important a question as WHAT. I also have a WHEN consideration and I’ve intuitively used this rule ever since I was a child. My simple rule is this: OUTPUTS in the morning, and INPUTS at night. In the morning, I do work, and write and respond to emails (the long-form ones at least). I allow as little input as I can in my mornings because inputs distract and take me away from my agenda. Towards the afternoon when my energy is low, I allow myself to read social media, or the news. I then read emails and respond to the ones that take less than 2 minutes to write. If it’s more than that, I save the response as a draft and rewrite in the morning. At night, as I am winding down and before going to sleep, I open my Instapaper app on my phone and go through stuff I have saved (bonus feature from Instapaper is that it estimates how much time it will take to read an article.). It has worked for me, made me a more productive person, which is to say, I have margin and more time to spend on the more important things in life.
If you have your own reflections and comments on intentional content consumption, or want to share your own simple rules in life, just hit reply — that will go straight to my inbox and I’ll get back to you (will read it in the afternoon and reply to you in the morning! 😉).
PS. Here are some of the people I follow on TikTok to make it a more intentional place for me to consume content:
- @lelaburris - Organized-ish. Organising and Cleaning for Real Life.
- @hicoachkai - Kai, MD. Self-healing Coach.
- @thedailyshow - The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. One of the most intelligent and funny talk show host in the US today.
- @anew.acu - Dr Eileen is an acupuncturist with really good health tips.
- @drjuliesmith - Dr Julie is a psychologist and author who gives life changing insights from her experience as a therapist.
- @maisyleigh - Maisyleigh is a software engineer & designer. I watch her TikTok videos to relax.
- @amauryguichon - if you want to see someone who is a MASTER at his craft, you should check out Chef Amaury. His art is chocolate.
- @officialawakeningworld - always inspiring, always wise words.
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More Great Stuff:
Beethoven regularly makes solitary walks around Vienna to remove himself from the musical pieces he's already worked on while giving him the time to expand on them later on. Here’s Beethoven’s surprisingly simple habit for creative breakthroughs.
- Creativity is an intentional process, not random inspiration. We develop rituals to consistently bring abstract ideas into the world. Creativity takes a lot of practice.
- Random bits of profound inspiration are few and fleeting; consistent work in your craft requires a sustainable way to develop good ideas into great ones. As Chuck Close puts it: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just show up and go to work.”
Over the Long Term, the Future is Decided by Optimists
- We know that bad things happen faster than good things because good things take time. But we look at history, and the trend is slow, but steady progress. And so there is a lot to be hopeful for.
- “Future generations not only have better living standards because of progress, but they also have more capability to solve problems because there’s more knowledge and because they have better tools. We can trust the fact that in the future, future generations will be able to solve problems that we cannot solve ourselves,” says editor and author Kevin Kelly, who believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic.
Ok! Now pause, get yourself to a window, look up to the sky, smile, and have a great day! Look forward to send you another letter next week!
☕ eric santillan