Ever since I became an independent adult, I started worrying about what I will call hereafter the problem of priorities: I only have limited time but many things that I can do, so what should I do and in which order? During college, I read David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) and adopted his system. Over the years, I organized and reorganized my tasks, documents, and files to the point where one could barely recognize the original GTD system as the reference specification. I believed perfecting my system was necessary to achieve my goals, but I slowly realized that anxiety was the driving factor behind this. I felt many times overwhelmed by the multitude of activities I had to do, of issues I had to be aware of. Hence, I needed to work on something that made me believe everything was under control. The harsh reality is that regardless of how you arrange your tasks in a list, on a calendar, or in a dashboard, you still have to actually do them. Time spent on pointless administrative work is time not spent on doing what actually matters.

I now settled on a task system implemented in Emacs Org-mode that's become very familiar and which only undergoes minor, incremental changes from time to time. Now, having a framework to manage your tasks is one thing; choosing what to do next is another. Having a program that tells you exactly what to do is but a fantasy. You can come up with as many rules as you want, and spend countless hours organizing your tasks in such ways that the rules can be applied programmatically, yet you cannot escape the burden of choice. The best one can do is to design a system, a framework, a program that can order tasks using criteria deemed important, making it easier to choose the next one.

In this article, I want to analyze a criterion that I keep thinking about lately: consumption vs. production activities. In particular, I worry that I'm wasting too much time reading blogs, checking the news, watching TV shows, and so on. So the question I want to answer is "When can I allow myself to be in consumer mode, and when should I be productive?"

Reading news, blogs, magazines, even books; watching TV, videos or movies; listening to music. These are all consumption activities, as they merely consist of passively¹ consuming material with no explicit goal in mind. No byproduct is generated, no skill is required and therefore no skill is improved. However, there are potential benefits like gaining information that could become useful for productive activities, relaxation, emotional regulation, or cultural enrichment. If we consume the wrong kinds of material, there are potential downsides as well, like learning false information from fake news or bad research, emotional disturbance by e.g. overthinking about what's happening in the world, or by listening too much to depressive music.

On the other hand, I call "productive" those activities that involve more than just consumption. There is always a goal involved which might be to produce an effective, concrete result, like cooking food or fixing something around the house, but it can also be to exercise and improve a certain skill.² This is the kind of activities or tasks you manage in your productivity system.

Almost by definition, it seems that productive activities are always preferable. However, consuming is more attractive for a simple reason: it's easier and usually more pleasurable to sit and consume media than to work and struggle. Additionally, working on something typically requires certain conditions, like having enough energy, being mentally alert, being in a certain place. Starting from this remark, we can formulate a general rule: Always do productive work, unless the conditions prevent you to. The conditions can be diverse but we should be wary of invoking conditions that can be easily overcome. Common acceptable conditions are: serious fatigue, missing material prerequisites. Not being in the mood is not acceptable and can be easily overcome.

Another important remark that we can make is that since we always have many kinds of tasks on our to-do lists, it follows that at least some of them should be feasible at any given moment. Some things you can only do at home, others require you to go somewhere else. Some tasks require intense concentration, other are simple and mechanical. Thus, we can formulate another rule: If you cannot do the top priority task, try the next priority. To apply this, we need to recognize what I mentioned in the introductory section: we cannot rely on a system to tell us what to do every time. If the task indicated by the system is not feasible at the moment, despair and resignation are not solutions. We must exercise our deliberate choice and try something else.

Looking at these two rules and assuming one's task list is always full, one might wonder if there is any time at all left for relaxation and entertainment. There sure is, as the rules should be applied with flexibility. If we've done some productive things for some time and now feel tired, it's perfectly fine to take a break and watch a video or read a blog. What's important is to be honest and deliberate and to not give in to laziness.

Having finished this article, I can't help but notice a certain irony in philosophizing what to do instead of doing something concrete. However, writing is a skill that I seek to improve, and I also hope that from now on I will apply the rules we established and worry less about wasting time. Let's summarize what we discussed:

• If you have tasks to do on your list, choose the most important one that you can do given the current environment and conditions.
• If you realize a task is too difficult, suspend it and choose something else.
• If no feasible task is identified, it's fine to consume media.
• Always be honest with yourself. Don't overestimate your fatigue. Most of the time there should be something productive to do that only requires a minimal effort.