I was at a great life coaching seminar recently. And one of the presenters always asked these questions:
“Was this interesting?”
“Was it useful?”
It’s useful to realize they’re two different things. “Interesting” is nice… but “useful” is the real deal! (At least as far as training seminars go.)
That doesn’t mean interesting-only information is bad. It just means it falls firmly in the Fun zone of my Work-Fun-Procrastination model. If having fun is all you want at the time, “interesting” is very good indeed!
Since that weekend, I started asking those questions of myself. And the results are very interesting (and useful!)! I became more aware of how I spend my time. Often, you might spend time reading interesting information, creating the illusion of doing something useful. But when you start asking if it’s useful, you realize that it isn’t getting you any closer to achieving your goals.
Funnily enough, when something is useful, that usually makes it interesting as well!
And if you realize you’re doing something that’s neither interesting nor useful? Hooray! You just increased your Awareness… and can now choose to do something different if you decide to!
(For that, I’ve got one more cool question you can ask yourself, which I will share at the end.)
Watch out for pseudo-useful information
Then there’s information that pretends to be useful, but is in fact, useless, or even anti-useful!
News reports can be great examples of this. When suddenly every TV channel starts madly reporting shark attacks, you will think only a madman would go to a beach.
In fact, shark attacks stay steady year after year. The media just decides to whip up a frenzy around them once every few years.
So if there’s no change from one year to the next, watching TV news about shark attacks adds no useful information. In fact, it can be anti-useful, if it stops you from going on a great vacation based on fear of an imaginary threat!
Another example might be productivity tools. Yes, it’s nice to be organized, but in the end, doing something useful comes down to… you know… doing something! If you spend hours tinkering with to-do lists and e-mail reminders and other bells and whistles, instead of getting something done… that’s not useful!
(Can you think of other examples of pseudo-useful things? I’d love to hear them in the comments!)
Once you become more aware of what you’re doing, you can change. And since I always recommend asking the right questions, here’s one for you:
“Do I want to be spending my time like this, right now?”
And then you decide, based on what you want to be doing at the time!
Was this blog post interesting, useful, or neither? 
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