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I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it's a constant source of anxiety leading to compulsive reloading of the feed. Other social networks are worse. Life's too short for this. I've also cut down on the web sources I follow, as information overload is a real thing, and we rapidly run into diminishing returns. For news, I now just peruse the FT, Guardian and Atlantic (+HN via http://hckrnews.com/ using the 'top 50%' setting) a couple of times a day, and Politico Magazine once per week. This covers a decent section of the political spectrum and if there's anything important going on I'll find it amongst those sources. I probably read half a dozen full articles each day. For non-immediate information, I browse A&L Daily, and I have print subscriptions to the following:
The Atlantic, Harper's, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Foreign Affairs, Philosophy Now, and The Philosophers' Magazine. Additionally, I listen to a selection of podcasts when I'm in the car. These cover international relations and news analysis, history, philosophy and comedy. That just about covers it; since I hit 40 and had a son my priorities changed, as did my outlook on life. Other than my family, I'm spending much more of my time on real hobbies and interests (in my case a bit of astronomy and photography, occasional writing, some cooking, and a lot of cycling and serious reading (books)), and less on time-wasting activities (social networks, web forums, television and video games). It's amazing how much extra time you can find if you cut useless things out of your life. |
If my backlog is getting too much for me to want to deal with, I simply reduce the number of articles to top 10 or top 20, and go from there.