News - Needed or Not? An Easy Way to Boost Your Productivity
As we grow up, we are often told that an essential part of being a good citizen is reading/watching/consuming the news, so that we can have an awareness of what is happening around us.
While that is certainly true, there are also many negatives associated with the habit. These include:
- Lost in reading: The point of a headline is to hook the reader in, so don’t feel too bad if once you start scrolling through the news you get caught in its trap.
- Compulsive reading: Do you ever find yourself opening up your news app/feed every time you check your phone? According to a study by the University of California Irving, it takes over 20 minutes for an average person to truly focused even after a small distraction. As you might guess, that is not good for your productivity.
- Anxiety: When was the last time the world had no problems? If that was the case the multibillion dollar industries making up the media industries would collapse. While reading the news can help make you more aware, sometimes that awareness can mean more anxiety or depression on your end.
Application
I am not trying to convince you to delete your news app or hide under a rock, many of media’s benifits certainly outweigh the bad. Rather make sure you control your media consumption, instead of your media controlling you.
What do I mean by this?
- Start your day off right: Do not, read the news when you first get up, don’t read it with breakfast, don’t read it when you first open your computer. I would suggest trying to get in a stretch of solid deep work before even thinking about checking the news. It is not so much that reading the news takes that long, for many of you reading it during breakfast wastes virtually zero time, instead the problem is your mind works best and most efficiently when it is uncluttered and not drifting off to various things you read. For most of you, nothing disastrous will happen if you spend your mornings uninformed about current events.
- Use good sources: You all already know this, enough said.
- Schedule: This one is optional, but some people find it helpful to block off 15–30 minutes of their day as “news/media consumption time”. I personally find if I am intentional about scheduling news consumption, I end up consuming high quality sources of news instead of scrolling through my phone news feeds during a spare five minutes of the day.
One way I personally have changing my news habits recently is reading my news in newsletter format. I subscribe to Morning Brew, which is a free daily newsletter with presents business news in an informative and entertaining fashion. (They don’t sponsor me in any way and this article was completely my own idea, but if you use my link I get a few stickers). From the makers of Morning Brew I also subscribe to Emerging Tech Brew, which as you can probably guess includes tech news. I have really enjoyed reading their content for the past couple of months as it is both engaging and trustworthy. They also put out other newsletters such as ones on retail, marketing, and smarter living.
Do you have a current system in place for reading news/media? If so, put it down in the comments. Have a nice day and stay productive!
