Productive Scrolling

By raise of hands who used social media as a learning tool?

I know I do. I find a lot of good insights scrolling through X or swiping up on a TikTok video. This is part of why I find these platforms so engaging is it’s a mix of entertainment and education, with motivation sprinkled in.

Here’s the problem I want to solve for myself: how do I shift some of the time I spend scrolling on social media and make it more productive?

No doubt, at times, I just want to be entertained and let my mind go numb scrolling. The better angel in me though wants to make good, productive use of my time.

This is a new angle to my learning system vision: productive scrolling. I want to repurpose the time I spend on social media into a productive way by taking some of the things I love about social media apps and making the feature set more purpose built for learning goals.

This is the design I’m playing with:

Each card in the feed is an insight, something you want to learn. Insights come from three places: the user manually entering them (least common), the user connecting an insight source (i.e. X bookmarks or Kindle highlights), the AI generating insights from the user’s learning goals.

The third place insights come from is, what I believe, the most powerful. An LLM is fully capable of creating useful insights on a huge range of topics. It is literally trained off the corpus of the Internet!

The goal of my app is to take the insights and put them in a structure so they are easy (and fun) to interact with. This is what I’m calling productive scrolling. Taking something we already do and turning it into a method of productivity.

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What do you think of this? I’d love your feedback on the design idea.

And this is just the start. I have so many ideas I’ll be show you the next couple of weeks.

#HappyLearning