How to Start Consuming Less and Creating More?

• The most reliable way to get better results is to just produce more crap.
• Most knowledge worth having comes from practice.
  • It comes from doing.
  • It comes from creating.
• The real tragedy of modern technology is that it’s turned us into consumers.

-- from Consume less, create more

Inspired by this article, I decided to consume less crap, and to create more crap of my own.

How to do that? It's as simple as any improvements:

1. Measure your baseline
2. Identify the bottleneck
3. Improve the bottleneck
4. Review the progress
5. Repeat

Below is my current status and how I plan to improve it:

• Consuming

  I consume a lot. Every month, I watch ~3 movies, ~10 episodes of tv shows, ~30 YouTube videos, read ~3 books, ~150 blog posts, and ~3000 of tweets.

  • Movies are an important part of my entertainment life. I can't leave them once and for all. But I can be more selective in what I watch. And set a deadline for what I want to watch. If I don't watch it before the deadline, then I won't.
  • TV is also a huge time consumer. So I don't watch the traditional TVs (that you can't decide what you watch) anymore. I choose what I want to watch and allocate time for them.
  • Good books are a joy to read. And it can worth hundreds of blog posts due to its density of knowledge. But if I can't apply the knowledge I learned from the book, then reading it would be a waste of time.
  • Blog posts and tweets are my way to follow the newest trends. But it's totally okay to not read them. We don’t miss what we don’t see. My current strategy is to read for accomplishing a goal. Google is always my best friend when I need to find some blog posts to learn about a topic.

• Creating

  On the other hand, I create a lot less. Every month, I open ~3 pull requests on GitHub, write ~5 blog posts, post ~25 tweets.

  Given a high consume-create ratio like this, I sometimes feel that I don't get enough chances to apply what I've learned.

  So, I'm trying to do my best to create more craps and make sure they are read or used by someone else.

  1. Contribute more to open source projects like hexpm/hexpm.
  2. Post 2 blog posts every week (= 8 posts every month).
  3. Use Twitter as a micro-blogging platform. It will be a backstop for my blog post ideas. If I can't convert an idea to a blog post in time, I would post it to Twitter.

If you like the craps I've created so far, please do follow me on Twitter, or shot me an email to discuss any topics. :)