[joneath]

While I agree with the premise that being a mindless consumer is probably not a good thing, I strongly believe that consuming is just as important as producing. Exposing one's self to as many different ideas as possible is incredibly important to being able to produce high quality work. If we go with the definition that a person is the aggregate of their experiences, then most of these experiences are things we consume from the external world and other people. Why not try and maximize these experiences?

I personally try and give myself at least an hour a day for just consuming whatever content I'm in the mood for. More times than not, I find use for this information sometime in my life. I think the hardest part is curating this content so it will be the most useful, which I think this post is getting at. Maybe the author doesn't find a benefit to reading their Twitter/Facebook stream which is fine, but this is not a producer vs. consumer problem, it's a signal to noise problem.

[alecperkins]

The majority of experiences may be consumption, but I would argue the more significant experiences are driven by production. I would also argue curation is in many ways more a facet of production than of consumption.

Also, I don't think it's so much about producer versus consumer (despite the title), but instead starting the day with easy productivity, to get into a mindset of getting things done. Consuming content is important, and can be very beneficial when curated well, but it's much easier to start consuming things than to start producing.