48 Days of Efficiency: The Experiment – Part 3 – Balancing Mindful Content Consumption Vs. Mindful Content Creation

Step Three: Mindful Media Content Consumption

This a biggie.  Like my previously stated semi-commitment to exercising and healthier living I’ve also at various times in my life struggled with my personal levels of ‘content consumption.’

For a short period of time I worked in the US Senate and was a double-Blackberry-25-news-sources-daily-reader kind of person.  Thank GOD twitter wasn’t invented yet.  If keeping up with the news was a kind of booze I would have been dead drunk.  I was consuming news and general media content so intensely I think it actually messed me up, definitely burned me out, and was a big part of the reason why I decided to leave the Hill.  When you work in the Senate you are expected to know just about everything that is going on with everything in the world all the time, which is unrealistic and kind of ridiculous.

At a certain point sometime before college I decided a similar thing about TV.  I still more or less strongly dislike TV.  I don’t own a TV and likely never will.  I decided there was essentially no content on TV worth ‘consuming’ and anything that was I could likely find on-line to watch later when it fit my schedule instead of my schedule needing to fit TV-land.

The choice to not own and rarely watch TV is something I still believe has been a very positive choice for my overall well being, and also for the purposes of this experiment, my overall energy efficiency.

BUT, where I left behind the TV – the internet, blogs, social media sites, feeds, and the like have taken up that void in ‘content consumption’ and likely then some.  The internet has become for me a kind of ‘choose you own adventure TV’.  It’s an endless pit of interesting tunnels or branches in a web.  One you’re caught in the web you can never get out! (insert evil laugh here).  Blast you Al Gore for your evil invention.

However, I rarely feel like my time on-line is wasted because I’m almost always using it to learn something new, interact with new people, or people I already know care about and am interested in their lives or work.  I’ve communicated with some of my creative heros only because of what the net enables.

But, it’s very much a double-edged sword.  No matter what I may be learning or doing that I feel adds value to my life while consuming media on-line it automatically takes away from my ability for ‘mindful content creation’.  In other words – No matter how great all the shit I’m taking in is… it takes time and energy away from my own work.  And for a person whose entire livelihood is dependant on their own ‘content creation,’ this can be a very damaging thing.

In starting out this new year I’ve put a lot of effort into being much more aware and mindful of how I spend my time in the, ‘content consumption’ department.  Becoming a more efficient person requires a lot  of attention to where your mental energy is being used.