Spare Time?
Choose to produce instead of consume.
This goes for pretty much anything: information, content, expertise, goods, resources, time, energy, food, media, entertainment, hobbies, food, etc.
People who consistently produce more than they consume always wind up in a better place than they started. As an added bonus, the more you produce, the easier it becomes and the quality increases with every iteration. It’s a choice that can quickly be turned into a habit.
The funny thing is that it’s just as easy to develop the bad habit of consuming instead. And it’s much more difficult to break that habit.
What about you? Are you consuming more than you’re producing? Or are you providing more value to the marketplace than you are expending?
(The irony is that I believe our ability to produce so efficiently is our tragic flaw, but that requires a much longer post to explain…)
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about 3 months ago
Technology today blurs this boundary even further. Todd Henry talks about a concept that I know I experience from time to time here: http://www.accidentalcreative.com/productivity/...
So you're right – we need to get better at defining goals and naming what we want to “produce,” otherwise it is easy to just “stay busy” instead of “producing results.”
about 3 months ago
Love this way of thinking about free time – one quick thought I had after reading this tho (probably for a different post) is that most can probably do a much better job of creating/defining “free time”; it's pretty easy for people to think they don't have any free time, yet in reality they spend hours/day doing things they deem “necessary” like “unwinding” with a few hours of TV.
A good first step might be realistically evaluating and understanding where you're spending your time which will also allow you to look at the creating vs. consuming pendulum more accurately…