How to turn social media consumption into creation

There is a lot of exciting content on social media: insightful Tweets, entertaining Reels, and Stories of friends living extravagant lives.

It's easy to get stuck in mindless scrolling as there is endless content to explore. The social media loop never ends.

Too much social media consumption is unhealthy and turns us into dopamine junkies if we're not careful. It took me some time, but I finally found a way to turn this tendency from consumption to creation.

Making time and attention

There is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more. You have to pick a few mediums that you engage with frequently.

I picked Twitter. That's where I find insights and connect with folks. I only occasionally check the other mediums.

The rest of my social time is spent messaging friends and creating content. We'll talk about the creation part soon.

Before leaving this subject, please minimize notifications on your phone as much as possible. Just turn it off. It's stealing your attention. You should only check social media when you have dead time.

Creation > consumption

Have you noticed how you consume all this content and then forget most of it? What if there was a way to make the time worthwhile? I encourage you to start taking notes. Note-taking is how you begin shifting the behavior.

Every time you see something interesting, you log it down. You write down your thoughts about it, categorize it into buckets of interest, and consider how it might be helpful later. You can use whatever tool floats your boat: Notion, Evernotes, Notes App, whatever.

Now, I dreaded taking notes when I was in school, but I've come to love taking notes of things that interest me in my daily life. What happens is you’ll start understand better what inspires you. You also begin to think about how it could be useful to others.

The things that make you tick are probably the things you'll want to talk about yourself.

As the notes grow, you discover relationships in seemingly unrelated subjects. You end up noticing patterns and trends and even making amazing new revelations.

At some point, you won’t be able to resist the urge to share your findings with the world. That’s your signal. Now produce your content and reap the benefits. The world is waiting to hear what you have to say.