You can get news everywhere. Like EVERYWHERE!!! Social media, television, newspapers, magazines, and the internet; everything has the news. With the 24-hour, 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year firehose of information continually being fired at you, it can get overwhelming. Personally, I have a heck of a time trying to keep up with everything happening in the world, partially because I have to work for a living, and also because there is simply way too much for one mere human, handsome though I may be, to take it all in. To solve this, I’ve been using a service called Feedly for a few years now, and I love how easy it is to use.
- No need to jump around from one website to another – I get news from a bunch of different places. It could be technology sites, personal health information, proper news, blogs, or periodicals that put out content that inspires me. No matter the source, if it’s online, I can route it to my Feedly feed. Instead of bouncing around the internet looking for news and sifting through the things I don’t want to get to the stories I do want, I let Feedly do the searching for me and scroll through my curated feed to get all my news in one spot.
- Blocking what you don’t want or need – There’s a LOT of news out there, and not all of it is good. Feedly has a great feature that, if specific words appear in a headline, it will remove those stories from my feed. I’ll be honest, I don’t have many words on my removal list, but just as an experiment, I decided to remove them to see what my feed would look like otherwise. I typically get anywhere from 100 to 250 items in my feed on any given day. The days that I removed the words, my queue went up to 500+ items each day! It was wild. I quickly put the removal word filters back on and was happy to get back to the news that I absolutely needed.
- Make it a part of your daily routine – I don’t know what it was like for you, but I can remember growing up and having both my parents reading the newspaper in the morning while having their morning coffee. To a degree, I do the same thing. There is a part of my morning when I drink my coffee and scroll through my news feed. It has become a part of my morning routine, and because of that, I have a space to take in all the news that I plan to throughout the day. Granted, there are day-to-day things that happen and people who will come up to me and say “MAN DID YOU HEAR WHAT HAPPENED????” but for me, being able to carve out a specific time of day to allow my information in is helpful. It allows me to take in as much news as I can without overwhelming me. If you make it a habit of taking in your news and information at a specific time, then it becomes much more manageable.
News is everywhere. Information is everywhere. That’s not the issue. The issue at hand is what data you choose to collect and how much you really need. When I was a kid, I didn’t take in any data. I didn’t read the newspaper or pay attention to the news broadcasts. Later in life, I switched and started trying to take in as much as I could for as long as I could. Frankly, both of those methods, in my opinion, are wrong. The middle was balanced, and measuring your data flow is a better approach. Yes, you could get lost on the information superhighway, but so long as you plan what you’re getting, it makes things a lot simpler and way less overwhelming. Feedly is an excellent tool for that. I know other tools do the same, but Feedly is the one that I like the best.
Where do you get your news?