I’m currently in a kick and reading a few books by Cal Newport, and just finished one of his more well known books, Digital Minimalism. Though there is a lot to consider from it, I wanted to focus on a thought I had regarding taking information flows that would be constant and concentrating them to a weekly or daily item. This concept is covered by the “Join the Attention Resistance” chapter, and, specific to this post, the “Practice: Embrace Slow Media.”
The proposal is simple, instead of assuming that you must stay up-to-date on every breaking story or event you should try to schedule it. Often times, it proposes, when you are following breaking events you feel more informed, but never have the full picture until later. At that point, most would find themselves better informed by waiting for the story to go from “developing” to “developed.”
Taking this within my own processes for news, primarily RSS, I realized that maybe I should consider adjusting this. I’ve often struggled with getting feeds from various news sites and seeing a deluge of information coming in. I’ve scoffed at the idea of Newsletters because I “felt” I would be less informed by relying on a delayed and smaller set of articles. However, I realize that maybe there are places where this makes sense, e.g. with major news sites.
I’ve decided to take the plunge and migrate some of my feeds to newsletters. Hopefully it means I will spend less time sifting through my feed inbox and more time quickly adding interesting items to my later pile to then review at a personally scheduled point in time.
This is still a work in progress, but maybe this can help me continue to claw back time from the attention economy.