The best (and healthy) way to stay informed

Ever since I started reading web news services like news.bbc.co.uk or gazeta.pl (web portal of polish biggest paper edition gazette), and various RSS services, I have been always dealing with two problems: information overflow and distraction.

Information overflow

Having almost 100 RSS sources, some of which updated hourly or even more often, leads to a problem with inability to absorb such an amount of information in a short time. Even if, the world changes rapidly so the information you’ve read may be true for a short time period only. The problem is all this stuff really interests me, so it’s hard to remove some of them. Madness!

Distraction

As the news are updated often reading them as soon as possible is kind of addiction. An icon appears in the dock or a message pops up, saying “you have x unread articles”, easily distracting you from your current tasks. This message makes you immediately wonder: “Does something interesting happened?” and, involving an element of rivalry, also: “I want to be first to know”. That’s what happened to me. 

Solution

A couple of weeks ago I decided to be strong and give up on my mania for staying informed. Here’s what I did:

• I no longer use desktop integrated client. I look at my email each hour and doesn’t read these not looking like something urgent. I simply left these to next day morning.
• I read my RSS once a day in the morning, then turn off the RSS reader. Nothing is that serious it can’t wait a little while longer.
• I removed these RSSes I often flag as interesting since I overuse the flags simply not returning to the marked articles (due to the information overflow).
• I completely stopped reading political news sites - now I prefer to turn a TV while I doing some things on my laptop. I’m sure only highest priority news are presented, I can easily stop listening to these not interesting to me, and as soon as news program ends I turn off TV. It’s hassle free.

And guess what. It works!

A question to you: did you deal with such a problem in your life? If so what are your tips?