Be a creator. Not a consumer.
A creator makes new value. Value people pay for in the form of time and or money.
Consuming doesn’t lead to new value.
Examples of creating is writing a poem, posting a podcast, writing a mission statement, writing music, and a *job.
*I put jobs in the creator section. Because if someone gets paid for their work, it is valued. But it might not be new value. Hence the asterix. Everyone has the potential to be a creator in their job. New value creates job security. How much new value are you creating?
Examples of consuming is watching tv. Playing video games. Learning a language. All education.
To make money, create.
To spend money, consume.
The point of this blog post is to paint the idea of dividing the work day into two types of work. Creation work and consumption work. The argument is creation work is what’s important. Consumption work is not.
To make consumption work useful, it must lead to creation work.
Here is what I classify as creation work. Creation work is the process of creating something from nothing that has the potential of being valuable to someone else.
Creation work is harder than consumption work. People want to create but consuming is so much easier. Creation work is put off to someday. Write a novel someday. Create a movie someday.
I fell and fall for the gravitational pull of consuming. I listen to non-fiction audio books, and watch ted talks. I am going back to school to get my masters degree. These are examples of consuming. But unless I create something from the information I get, it is no different than watching tv.
Consumption work can be very misleading. Especially learning. Because It has the appearance of productivity. To make this unproductive time into new value/creation work, create new value. Even watching tv can be turned into new value. As an example, create a blog that critiques various tv episodes.
Now you might be asking: should I never consume and always create? Some consumption work is critical. But consume as little as possible. Consume what is needed to create. And no more. Then get to work creating.
I am going back to school and here is my narrative: I am going to school as a consumer to learn how to be a creator. I am going in as a consumer and coming out a creator. How soon can I turn consumption work into creation work?
How I track my day
How much of the day is spent doing creation work or consuming work? To find out, track it on a spreadsheet. I use Numbers on Mac. I divide my day into fifteen minute blocks. Starting from 4:30am and ending at 5:00pm. I label each cell as create or consume. Along with the activity (example – Create: Blog and Consume: Spanish). And I create a condition for each cell to change color based on how it is labeled. Green for create and Red for consume. So at a glance I see how I’m spending my day. Green good. Red bad.
I allocate all of my creative stuff (green) in the morning. Because I want to get the most impactful stuff (a.k.a. creation work) done in the morning. It feels great to get a big head start to my day. And it frees me to do my consuming stuff later. I can consume without guilt because I have created.
More green blocks than red blocks is ideal. But in the beginning this is challenging. Because beginners don’t know very much. And it is hard to create something of value with little information. Further, it takes courage to create. It takes guts to say look at me. Look what I made. Do you like it? I still struggle with this. I have managed to get my green to red ratio about 60/40. But I am working at it everyday. And soon I would like it to be more of a 80/20 split. I never what to completely eliminate red. Because red is where new information is learned that might not have been learned creating.
The big take away is this: If no time of the day is spent doing creation work, start today with one block of green. One fifteen minute creation block. And build from there. Not creating is a no no. We all want you to create. We want to see what wonderful creations your mind and body can come up with.
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