With both of these techniques, it becomes very clear how you are spending your time. It’s important to draw a distinction that some of us fall prey to—information consumption and diminishing returns.
Consuming information is almost always seen as a net positive. It’s what we believe underlies being educated and intelligent, and reading in particular is seen as superior to more passive forms of media consumption.
The point is that it’s easy to feel like we’re being productive by reading, when all we’re actually doing is wasting time in a slightly more intellectual way than binge-watching Game of Thrones. When we justify our information consumption in this way, what we’re really doing is justifying our procrastination. We use information as a procrastination tool. Reclaim your lost time and get started by going on an information diet.
Information diets aren’t about being less educated or cutting out leisure reading; they’re simply about considering our end goals and if we are unconsciously doing something detrimental to those goals. Too often and too easily, we get sucked into information, and when we consume, we cannot do.
But how do we decide what information is worth consuming and what’s worth leaving on the shelf? How do we even know what information is sucking up our time? Begin by taking an honest look at how you spend your time. You can do this in the following steps.
1. Survey your information consumption.
2. Remove at least 50 percent of the least valuable content you consume and cut the noise from your information diet.
3. View descriptions of information pieces as pitches for your time and attention.
4. Say no more often.
5. Consider cutting entire information forms from your life.
6. Monitor how much of any one information source you’re consuming.
For one week, make a list of every type of media you consume, from your Facebook feed to War and Peace.
It’s important to know exactly where your time is going so you can make cuts. You might be surprised to find you’re scrolling through social media feeds for hours per day, or you may discover that you spend far too many hours inhaling the latest bestseller. It doesn’t matter what you’re consuming when you begin this process; what matters is that you identify where your time is going so that you can redirect it toward activities that need to get done.
After you make your list, you’ll see a lot of different mediums. Social media, books, magazines, television, podcasts, and similar items will probably populate your list. Some are genuinely valuable; they help you be more creative, bring you joy, and make you and your life better. They assist you in your work, or they are flat-out required research to keep you progressing and growing. This doesn’t all have to be edifying; genuinely enjoying a TV show or other product can be a good enough reason to keep it in your life.
But right off the bat, you can also see that some of these are useless and keep you stuck in inaction. You’ll find a lot of items that you didn’t actively choose to watch or read; they were just there, in front of you, and you consumed them on autopilot. Autopilot as unconscious consumption is the real enemy here.
You can tell something should be cut out of your life when it has no current or practical utility. Only information we can immediately apply to our current situation is important. This is what happens when we fall into the Wikipedia rabbit hole, for instance—suddenly we end up learning about 17th-century woodworking when we were only trying to become knowledgeable about one historical figure.
Hypothetical or just in case information can also be useful, but most of the time it shouldn’t be your current focus. This is like researching the type of clothing you should buy when you lose 50 pounds—it’s a legitimate concern, but not at the present moment.
Once you cut out 50% of the least useful media you consume, you’ll have that much more spare time to devote to the things you’ve been putting off. That’s way better than wasting time skimming through posts or blankly watching a show you don’t care about. This tactic in itself isn’t a cure for procrastination, but it does help when you are at the fork in the road, and if a distraction is less handy, it’s one less obstacle to working.
It helps to view television, books, articles, and podcasts as pitches for your time and attention. Both are finite; everything we consume also consumes our time and energy. In addition, we can’t produce at the same time as we’re consuming. It’s impossible to do both at once.
At this point, it should be obvious that being entertained or educated doesn’t come free of cost, even when no money is being charged. Even when items are free, they’re not without cost to your work and productivity.
In addition to considering the inherent cost of consuming information, there’s a much simpler way to change our habits: commit to saying no. Merely deciding to stop indulging in media a set number of times, say three times per week, can radically change how we interact with the world.
Without consciously setting limits, it’s easy to see keeping up with friends on social media as an obligation or to feel like we have to finish watching the show we like, but none of that’s compulsory. At all points, we control our action. We can always say no.
Finally, consider how much time you’re sinking into all the remaining forms of media you consume. How much time is spent on television, reading, listening to podcasts, or scrolling through feeds? If you spend too long in any one place, it’s likely you’re devoting time to those activities because they’re automatic, not because you’re really enjoying them. Cutting back in those areas can leave more time for the good things in life.
Learning to make cutbacks on attention expenditures lets us focus on information that helps us grow, learn, and thrive. Fortunately, the process of reducing the noise from your media streams can be approached in many ways, allowing anyone to make small—or even major—changes in their routines.
