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?
Psi 9:09 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink |
I used to have similar problems as you had and I found more or less similar solutions… (that’s not to say that I’m now free from the reading-every-single-page-on-the-web addiction – far from that ;)
I used to spend literally half a day sometimes reading RSS… Now I only open the reader for maybe 15-20 minutes after I come to work, then I close it – you’re right that the constant notifications that you have new unread articles are terrible. It also helps when you realize that only a small part of the feeds actually provide content that’s really really useful, and regularly remove those which aren’t interesting. Over time, I also learned to glance quickly at a list of new articles, open just one or two of them, and mark the rest as read. It really took me some time before I discovered that I don’t need to read every single news item that comes to my RSS reader :)
Right now, I have a little over 30 feeds in the reader, but most of them are blogs on which there’s not more than 1 article per day on average, or even 1 per week. I have almost no big ones, those that have 50 or more per day, and these were the worst ones – Digg, Gazeta.pl for example. (With gazeta.pl I switched to an email newsletter – it’s nice to know what’s going on in the world, so that if there’s a war I don’t miss it ;) – but I don’t need to read every single article; so I get just a selection of the most important ones every day in an email. The TV method wouldn’t work for me, I can’t do more than one thing at the same time…).
Psi 9:15 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink |
Check this out too http://zenhabits.net/2008/12/a-minimalists-guide-to-using-twitter-simply-productively-and-funly/ – I love the part about how Twitter (and I suppose other things on the web too) is like a river, that you shouldn’t try to catch every drop of the water…
Jakub Pawlowicz 8:49 am on April 2, 2009 Permalink |
Nice article – I really like the list of things Twitter is good for and maybe some day I will give some of them a try. Thanks!