If you want to produce more content, consume less of it
In today’s social media environment, quality content is often the key difference between a great social media effort and one that’s not so great. There’s some degree of difficulty associated with producing good short-form posts and photos, but the bar goes way, way up when it comes to developing compelling blog posts or well-produced video. Like most things in life, the reason many people don’t do it is that it takes much more effort.
One of the barriers is something pretty simple: time. As much as the world has changed in recent years, we still have just 24 hours in a day. Our working lives have become more complicated, but the amount of time we have to get it all done has remained the same. Add in the imperative to create substantive content and it’s clear why so many of us fall short.
However, there’s a way to mitigate this challenge – if we’re willing to accept a hard truth. Often, the main thing holding us back isn’t time so much as priorities. We put content creation in the “when I get around to it" column, which leads – of course – to it never getting done.
Yet another hard truth may reveal an opportunity to be more productive in the coming year. Many us spend a significant amount of time consuming content: everything from books, podcasts and magazines to blog posts, movies and YouTube videos. I’m not suggesting that this is a bad thing in itself – after all, there’s nothing wrong with downtime and even less wrong with educating yourself about your profession – but it may be that our voracious appetite as consumers of content eats away at the opportunity we have to be producers of content.
Think for a minute what might be possible by the end of 2015 if you spend less time with content created by others and instead created your own content:
Cutting back just 10 minutes of consumption every weekday would give you more than 40 hours of time for content creation – enough to write at least a few month’s worth of good blog posts.
Want to do more? If you eliminate 20 minutes of content consumption every weekday, you could have enough time to mix video content into your blog.
Even more ambitious? Try eliminating 30 minutes of content consumption every workday. (Think of it as one sitcom a night, or a few daily scrolls through your Facebook feed.) That’s enough to begin writing a book –or maybe even finish it.
In moderation, content consumption isn’t a problem, but too much of it takes time away from other activities. Start by auditing how you spend your time with all forms of media. How much TV do you watch each week? Do you spend too much time playing games on your phone or a console? Do you have the same bad habit I do (one this column reminds me I need to change) of reading books that reinforce what you already know without adding much that’s new? If so, maybe it’s time to cut back a little.
If you’ve always wanted to create content, the time you need to do it well will never simply appear; you’ll have to create it by reallocating the finite number of hours you have at your disposal. By taking the step to be less of a consumer you’ll be well positioned to become more of a producer. And once you do that, who knows? The next piece of content you consume may be your own.
