There are plenty of lifehacks for keeping up with the information flow. Organizing it, having read later
lists, processing it once a day, etc. I've tried many of them, but none of them worked in the long run. When you have a torrent of news coming at you from all directions, it's impossible to keep up.
There are social news sites like Reddit or HN that are supposed to give you handpicked trendy stuff. It's a step forward, but you only get what ticks for the masses, and if it's good, you'll get it more than once - popular content is usually reposted and relinked multiple times - everyone wants to be the one to spread the important news. Next time, before posting a link from HN top page to your Twitter or Google+ account, think again. Internet is redundant enough. Stop sharing same things over and over.
I've taken a few steps to reduce my own digital footprint in this bloated era of useless information. I've stopped using following services:
- Facebook: No value whatsoever. Sadly I couldn't just deactivate my account because I'm a developer and have some apps I want to keep alive, so I just locked myself out by changing my password to something random.
- Google+: Never understood the need for it.
- LinkedIn & all other online career tools: I usually got my jobs as a result of direct recommendation by someone I know in real life. Over ~10 years of use, LinkedIn gave me nothing but lots of recruiter spam. So long, annoying skill endorsements.
I wanted to deactivate my Twitter account too, but kept it for authentication purposes. Sometimes it's the only acceptable type of auth that some app offers. I promise to tweet less though.
And for my own information diet:
- No social networks.
- No television - haven't been watching it for ages anyway. And a while ago I disconnected the external antenna.
- No local news sites. There are some online gazettes that everyone in Lithuania feels obligated to read daily. Sorry, I'm not into politics, local scandals or people bitching about high costs of winter heating.
- As few RSS as possible. Nothing that reposts content from other places. Nothing that posts daily.
- No pointless random browsing to amuse myself. Although it's a hard habit to get rid of, I'm doing my best.
Reading a book is so much better than reading random crap on the internet.
Life has just become much simpler.
Minimalism