The average person consumes 50 minutes of entertainment to every 1 minute of education. The average screen time in the United States is 7 hours 4 minutes per day. According to the average reading time and average book length, you could be reading 1 book per day with even just half of the time spent in front of a screen!
But people do want to learn, they are just being helplessly pulled in by the cheap dopamine rewards these platforms put in front of them.
Your smartphone is a portal to the most knowledge that’s ever been available to us in human history. But its also a source of endless distraction, chaos, doomscrolling and consuming mind numbing entertainment that prevents you from achieving your goals.
We can’t stop doomscrolling because our brains are wired to seek tragedy, this is why rubbernecking is a natural phenomenon. It’s why the news focuses on tragedy, war and death.
Garbage in, garbage out.
I have spent countless hours researching this phenomenon. I wanted to learn how do successful people use social media and stay productive?
What I found was that an overwhelming majority of successful entrepreneurs simply don’t follow the news. They are aware of the psychological tricks the news plays on the mind to keep us feeling fearful and anxious, while not being able to turn away.
Top performers also know that what’s on the news does not impact their day to day responsibilities.
So, how do the most successful people in the world consume digital media without getting helplessly sucked into mindless scrolling?
The secret is, they’ve flipped the E vs E ratio – a metric which refers to the amount of time someone spends on Education vs Entertainment.
According to Brian Tracy, how much time a person spends on their education vs the time they spend being entertained is reflected in their income.
If this is even remotely true, doesn’t it seem like something worth taking action on?
Here are 3 ways you can flip the E vs E ratio to enter the top 20% of performers by spending more time learning and less time consuming entertainment.
First, replace your media consumption time with self education. You can do this by listening to audiobooks or personal development and finance podcasts instead of listening to music in the car – this is what Tracy refers to as turning your vehicle into a university on wheels.
Start watching educational YouTube content so the algorithm puts more of it in front of you. Unfollow accounts that don’t provide educational value to your life.
Second, start tracking your E vs E ratio with a note taking app or pen and paper. This helps you become more aware of how you are spending your screen time. At the end of the day, tally up how much time you’ve spent consuming entertainment and how much time you spent learning, then you can take steps towards reducing the ratio.
You can even automate this with a habit tracking app, or by adding the functionality in your daily note in Obsidian.
Which relates to the third action, which is to use a note taking app like Obsidian or Notion to create a “second brain” so you can seamlessly capture, connect, synthesize and distribute the knowledge you’re acquiring.
Doing this transforms your device from a source of endless distraction into a productivity machine, capturing information and distilling it into valuable intellectual assets that fuel your creative efforts.
The top 20% are focused on education and trying new things to improve their lives and the lives of others as a result.
Be brave enough to be bad at something new and you’ll excel beyond 80% of other people.