In the past I've cut out the news and felt much better fairly quickly. However, it gets to a point where there's something that happens that I should be aware of - like the annual budget speech, or something related to my industry that's hit a headline.
I guess I need a means of separating the 99% outrage-inducing, unactionable mainstay from the 1% of things that I genuinely need to know about.
First, I started by stopping reading daily news; stopping refreshing the headlines every time I had a few minutes; stopping getting alerts; avoiding 'news 24/7' channels like the plague.
Then I stopped reading weekly news - what was the point? Whilst it's less of a burden that daily/hourly/minutely news, it's still unactionable for me - it has no utility, as you say.
But then it's been months and things have happened that I should know about, and the only option I have is to go back to getting alerts and 'triaging' my interest in them - except that this means that I have to process each headline again, and I'm basically back where I started.
it's a hard problem. I keep on HN because I want to keep an eye out for technology that interests me, and to check out people's cool side projects. But then that's maybe 1/20 posts and in other posts I end up just getting drawn in and dragged down by petty emotions and conflict. If there were a way to filter the latest posts down to just things I'm interested in and get that in a newsletter I might do it, but then how do I accurately describe what I'm interested in without seeing it first? I think it just requires the self-discipline to ignore and move past posts you know won't bring any benefit.
In the past I've cut out the news and felt much better fairly quickly. However, it gets to a point where there's something that happens that I should be aware of - like the annual budget speech, or something related to my industry that's hit a headline.
I guess I need a means of separating the 99% outrage-inducing, unactionable mainstay from the 1% of things that I genuinely need to know about.
First, I started by stopping reading daily news; stopping refreshing the headlines every time I had a few minutes; stopping getting alerts; avoiding 'news 24/7' channels like the plague.
Then I stopped reading weekly news - what was the point? Whilst it's less of a burden that daily/hourly/minutely news, it's still unactionable for me - it has no utility, as you say.
But then it's been months and things have happened that I should know about, and the only option I have is to go back to getting alerts and 'triaging' my interest in them - except that this means that I have to process each headline again, and I'm basically back where I started.