Do you ever feel like you’ve wasted your time after browsing content on Twitter, or reading your saved articles on Pocket?

I used to experience this all the time.

Maybe I'm just feeling guilty for procrastinating 😞

There are times when I know I'm procrastinating and it makes sense to feel bad about consuming content. This is when I trick myself into thinking I’m being productive by consuming "useful" content while putting off an important task.

This is not always the case though.

Even when I'm not procrastinating and I know I'm consuming content purely for fun, I still question whether there is a point in it.

Consume content with a clear purpose 🎯

I don’t know if there’s a name for this feeling but I know how to avoid it.

The solution is to consume content with a clear purpose. My purpose is use what I consume as inspiration for creating my own content. When I read an article I pay extra attention to the content as I'm looking for ideas that will help me write about a particular topic.

This is when I can truly enjoy the content I'm consuming.

Don’t limit your creations to writing 🧑🏻‍💻

This content creation purpose is applicable to other areas as well such as coding.

For example, I would come across an interesting open source project and I have no reason for exploring it further. I just skim through the documentation—thinking that I was learned something new! Now fast forward a few day and I might not even remember the details of the library.

Now let's assume I have a personal project and I'm creating code.

I now have purpose to explore open source tools I come across to understand them better and see if I can use them in my own project. I might even contribute to the open source project. Who knows what will come out of it? Maybe nothing! But at least I have a purpose and all that work doesn't feel like a waste of time anymore.