Stop Wasting Time and Use Twitter to Stay Informed

Perhaps, like me, you spend far too much time reading news, blogs, journals. And you don’t like it.

Content doesn’t just arrive once a day anymore — it rains down continually. It’s easy to fill every spare moment with this shallow pursuit. Refreshing web pages and checking for updates. Moments that could be much better spent.

Going cold turkey might work for some, but I don’t want to disengage from news completely. I enjoy keeping up with current affairs. I just want to reduce my dependency. Minimize my reading time. Get the most bang for my buck.

It turned out the answer had been staring me in the face all along. Hiding in plain sight. Twitter.

No, I don’t mean Twitter the endless time sink, the bottomless scrolling list of doom. I mean Twitter the bountiful source of curated, low-noise news. This is what I mean:

• @bbcnewsmostread — “Most Read” articles from BBC News
• @HNTweets — Stories from the front page of Hacker News
• @redditprogtop — Weekly Top Stories from Reddit Programming
• @vergefeatured — Featured articles from The Verge home page
• @xkcdComic — Feed from the xkcd webcomic

Combining these into a Twitter List gives me my own personalized news feed. My cost of staying informed has shrunk to 5–10 minutes, twice per day — freeing up the rest of my time for deeper pursuits. I’m much happier with the new balance.

I hope this inspires you to reclaim your time too!

Originally published at jamesfmackenzie.com