Here Is How You Can Consume Content Without Feeling Like You’re Wasting Time

Do you ever feel like you’ve wasted your time after browsing content on Twitter, or reading your saved articles on Pocket?

I used to experience this all the time.

Maybe I’m just feeling guilty for procrastinating 😞

There are times when I know I’m procrastinating and it makes sense to feel bad about consuming content. This is when I trick myself into thinking I’m being productive by consuming “useful” content while putting off an important task.

This is not always the case though.

Even when I’m not procrastinating and I know I’m consuming content purely for fun, I still question whether there is a point in it.

Consume content with a clear purpose 🎯

I don’t know if there’s a name for this feeling but I know how to avoid it.

The solution is to consume content with a clear purpose. My purpose is use what I consume as inspiration for creating my own content. When I read an article I pay extra attention to the content as I’m looking for ideas that will help me write about a particular topic.

This is when I can truly enjoy the content I’m consuming.

Don’t limit your creations to writing 🧑🏻‍💻

This content creation purpose is applicable to other areas as well such as coding.

For example, I would come across an interesting open source project and I have no reason for exploring it further. I just skim through the documentation — thinking that I was learned something new! Now fast forward a few day and I might not even remember the details of the library.

Now let’s assume I have a personal project and I’m creating code.

I now have purpose to explore open source tools I come across to understand them better and see if I can use them in my own project. I might even contribute to the open source project. Who knows what will come out of it? Maybe nothing! But at least I have a purpose and all that work doesn’t feel like a waste of time anymore.

This post was created with Typeshare