Consumption vs. Creation

What percentage of your work day do you spend consuming things? How much time do you spend each day consuming Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Hacker News, Techmeme, Google Finance, ESPN, Wikipedia, or whatever else suits your fancy? 30 minutes per work day? 1 hour per day? 6 hours per day?

I was speaking with an attorney friend recently, and I asked him how much time he wastes during the day, consuming sites like ESPN. I suggested possible answers.
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“30 minutes per day?”

He replied, “Yeah, definitely. Or maybe more like 2 hours. Yeah, 2 hours, easily, on ESPN alone.”

This is symptomatic of the digital world we live in today. Everyone — blogs, marketers, journalists, friends, media outlets — is becoming a master at grabbing attention. The firehose of information flying in our direction is at an all-time high. And it will only increase.

In the old days, if you wanted to learn what camera you might want to buy, you could go to a store, ask a few questions and purchase it. Or you could ask a friend. But now, 9 trillion terabytes of YouTube reviews, web reviews and other purchasing options await your precious attention.

It can almost create a sense of digital nausea. How many words a day does the typical desk worker consume nowadays? How many photos and videos? I think it’s staggering, and I’m not sure our brains were evolved to handle this much verbal data consumption.

We all fall into this trap. Personally, I don’t consume the FITS (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat) much, but I definitely research everything to death and I love to follow my curiosity down so many intellectual rabbit holes, usually starting with a Hacker News post or a Wikipedia search.

In contrast to consumption, what percentage of your day do you spend creating things? Writing a blog post, shooting a video, penning a document, writing a book, using your hands to craft something? I would surmise that the typical desk worker consumes at least 90% of the day, and creates only 10% of the day, if not worse.

Imagine what would happen if you consumed no digital data at all during the day? What if you wandered into an actual forest armed only with a notebook and a pen. What would you create?

Seth Godin has said that some writers find efficacy in boring themselves to death so that they can write. Would Jack London or Ernest Hemingway have created their works of art if they were plugged into the 24-hour attention-splitting wonder-chine that is the internet? No chance.

There is a reason why Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden by a pond, not a modem. (Only took 40 seconds and 10 billion neurons to verify that on Wikipedia).

This is not meant to be an indictment or a judgment, just an observation. We are bombarded. Seriously bombarded. We are bombarded by information overload to the sickest degree.

The only solution, I think, is to take some time to shut off the firehose. Allow yourself to be bored, to be dumb. Not everything has to be looked up on the internet the second the question is posed in your head. Empty your mind.
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And create.