David Sparks of the popular blog Macsparky, on his dealing with the online news. His observation:
It takes a lot of time. I need to make a living and support my family. Excessive time with the news gets in the way of that.
It closes my mind. With the way modern algorithms work, once I read one story, the computers decide what kind of news I like and try to feed me more of that. The longer I go, the more biased and extreme the feed gets.
It wipes me out. This year. This year. Do I need to explain how reading too much news drains me of the will and energy to do anything productive?
His plan on dealing with it? Timeboxing:
So, I am taking steps. I am rerunning my timers, this time with the idea of putting a 30-minute box around the news every day. Once I hit 30 minutes, I am done. Rather than get lost in the news, I would rather use that time for something else. Maybe I can spend a bit of it trying to make things better.
By and large I have stayed away from news about day to day politics for over a year, and that has been a big benefit for my peace of mind. But what David is doing is similar to how I timebox my other sources of distraction, Reddit and Twitter, even after my 30-day isolation.