How to Get Control of Your Media Consumption Habit
A practical guide to managing all the books, newsletters, and podcasts that overwhelm us in the attention economy
In the attention economy, you can consume anything but you can’t consume everything.
The gap between anything and everything is a “save for later button”. Sometimes it's a queue, a bookmark, or a feed. Whatever you call it, it's nagging for your attention.
This is first-world stress.
Too much content, too little time. Sadly, the solution isn’t a better or more efficient way to consume everything. It's a mindset shift along with a strategic way to navigate the mind field of information overload.
Saved for Later: The Time and Attention Problem
The “save for later” button is a fairly recent invention.
For me, it started with the Comcast cable guy installing a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) in my living room. I now pressed one button to record any show and watch it later.
This ability to “time-shift” TV was revolutionary. The days of appointment television were gone. On-time was now on-demand. Netflix and streaming soon followed.
Apps called “Pocket” and “Instapaper” invented the DVR of the web. Save any article for later consumption.
It got even better with the revival of the newsletter. Good writing was now a click away. It turned email addresses into gold bars for creators and the mundane inbox into another place for distraction.
On-demand also changed the way we listened to media. Goodbye radio. Hello, podcast feed. We are now welcomed with red badges of unplayed episodes.
All of this was made with good intentions. Give us a better way to collect content and consume it on our own time. With this, the delusion of tomorrow will bring more time than today crept in. We then got trigger-happy with the save button assuming we would clear our buckets of content.
The problem has compounded further. Walk into the attention jungle, new predators seek to catch our eyeballs and steal our time. In this new reality, we are always the prey.
To find relief we need to change our consumption habits from a list to a conveyor.
The Conveyor Belt Method to Consumption
Most of us treat our content like a buffet. Walk over and put every item on our plate. Then feel the burden of having to finish everything. This is the game of to-do list consumption.
Instead, treat content like a sushi conveyor belt. Let things pass by and only grab a few rolls.
This is hard. Everything looks good. But this is where we need to find acceptance. We will miss out on great content. Maybe it will come around again, or maybe it won’t.
The alternative is unsustainable. As our lists get longer, each new item adds to a growing burden of unfinished.
Don’t underestimate the cost of unfinished. It takes up unconscious mental space in our heads. Our brains tend to remember incomplete tasks versus complete ones.
Out of sight — The Hinge model
Dating app Hinge’s designers know this. They omit a feature that makes sending messages less burdensome. There is no sent folder.
The conversation thread appears only if that person replies. This less but better approach makes sense. It’s a numbers game. Most messages sent get ignored.
We need to apply a similar strategy to our lists of content. We need to make them invisible.
With these principles in mind, let's reinvent the save button for books, newsletters, and podcasts.
The Knowledge Food Pyramid
The goal is to have a low-calorie, balanced diet of content.
Low calorie means we stop consuming so much. Balanced means having a variety of content but favoring the type that keeps us strong and healthy.
There are many types of content but my primary focus is on informative entertainment. You are hoping to extract valuable knowledge from the source.
This is tricky though. The knowledge medium we choose is critical. At its best, it can help us solve problems. At its worse, give us anxiety that Russia is about to launch a nuclear warhead.
Books — The lean protein
Books are the protein of knowledge. They build our attention muscle and provide nutritional-rich knowledge.
Books give us the best ROI. Authors spend years researching and writing a book. You spend ten to fifteen hours digesting their book.
Contrast that with podcasts, newsletters, and the daily news. All of them have deadlines. The incentive is to churn content, not produce the best.
The other advantage is they train our attention. We consume books differently. On our phones, we manically scroll and skim. In this world of overstimulation, books give us the ability to practice sustained focus and read slower.
Books have their problems, though.
The first is how we put books (and their writers) on a pedestal. Sacred text. This mindset prevents us from quitting bad books. This compounds due to us buying most books, which leaves us with a sunk cost, that makes us suffer through to finish.
The second problem is the book status game. How many books can I read in a month? This is the ultimate vanity metric. It’s the side quest that makes to-do-list consumption toxic.
No. One. Cares. Change your mentality! There isn’t going to be a test on this. Read often. Quit often. And skim chapters when you need to.
Book scarcity
Make the public library your new amazon shopping cart. Not because they are free. Books are cheap and a great investment. Buy books you’ve read. Rent books you haven’t.
Libraries have a supply issue. It’s not on-demand. It’s what’s available. If you are picky and quit books often, you will be waiting on them, rather than them waiting on you.
Newsletters — Healthy fats
Newsletters are written with the attention economy in mind. Short and snappy. A good dose of reading these are fun and informative. The problem is abundance.
You might have 10–12 newsletters hit your inbox weekly. Unsubscribing is a good idea but another strategy is using the hinge model of invisible.
The way we do this is simple. Create a new email address exclusively for newsletters. This gets newsletters out of our primary inbox.
There are four benefits:
Less time dividing your attention. If I go in looking to see my electricity bill, I don’t get sucked into something else.
More Friction — Since it’s a separate account, it’s harder to log into. And it’s something to remember. This allows the content to build up. We can then take the conveyor belt approach and be picky.
Focused intention — This turns your newsletters into an RSS feed of content. When you enter this email account you know exactly what you are doing.
Searchability — I archive the best newsletters. I then search for keywords, if I ever want to read them again or get inspiration for something I am writing. It’s the PKM system for lazy people.
Podcasts — The complex carb
Podcasts are the carbs in our knowledge diet. Delicious but empty, if it’s all we consume.
In our over-scheduled lives, many have replaced books with podcasts. The reason is convenience. We can drive, walk and do chores while listening. The advantage of only needing our ears is also the disadvantage.
Podcasts are a passive way to consume. Because we listen on the go, they don’t lead to proper digestion and reflection.
This lack of reflection is also due to having too many. This means playing constant catch-up, along with futile tactics like tweaking the playback speed and finding timestamps.
The better strategy is going after your feed.
First, we need to limit the number of shows. Unsubscribe to all except a select few. Then create a list of additional shows somewhere in your notes app.
For example, I enjoy listening to Deep Questions by Cal Newport. The rule is I can listen but I cannot subscribe.
This forces me to remember the show, search for it, and add an episode to my queue. This extra effort makes me conscious of what I am listening to. Like our newsletter inbox, episodes build up and we become more selective.
This approach makes unsubscribing easier. We are not eliminating podcasts but letting them rotate back to us when we remember. They are always a few swipes away.
Saving Isn’t Necessary Anymore
The save button is deceptive. It’s supposed to make things easier but it made things harder. We are wired to hoard. It’s actually no different than in the physical world.
Decluttering and getting rid of old possessions in our homes can be difficult. One way to motivate yourself to toss things is by telling yourself, “I still own it, but right now it’s at the store. I can grab it when I need it.”
We need the same approach to everything we want to consume in the digital world before it slowly consumes us.
🌟 My Favorite Things
📚Book - The Comfort Crisis. An amazing book on how society has slowly removed every aspect of discomfort from our lives. The author tells the story through a fun Alaskan adventure. It explores boredom, being outdoors, hunger, and a bunch of other topics.
Some of my favorite tidbits.
Americans spend 93% of time indoors in climate control enviroments.
Steve Jobs was a big fan of boredom. “All the technology stuff is wonderful but having nothing to do can be wonderful too.”
There are two types of hunger. Real hunger and reward hunger. We use food eat to deal with big and smaller stressors. Break ups/pandemics, deadlines, and long work days. The emotion of eating is interesting and makes me want to explore this further.
Thanks for reading!
Irfan
If my writing brought you value, please share it with someone else.
Not a subscriber? Sign up for free below.