Twitter detox - update

I think I’m doing just fine without twitter and all those silly banter over so many different issues bothering folks I think are worth following across all spectrums spanning Politics, global affairs, sports, technology, movies, latest trends.

I think I did save a lot of time from pursuing what I define as low value information and reactions to news events. The very nature of social media is such that it sucks you down the rabbit hole very quickly, I concluded that I have very little to gain from this. It occurred to me that I can perhaps try to fit in way more books that what I read nowadays. So that is what I set out to do

Last year with lot of effort towards the end I managed to hit 20 books. This year even though things are getting busier at work, I figured that I can do better simply by channelizing the time spent on twitter towards books.

So far by end of March I have finished 12 books. So I consider this as a win.

One of the main reasons for spending time on twitter and whatsapp and medium was to learn and discover stuff and the quest continues. The goal was to find information but the path to that was littered with banter which while it is fun and engaging at times does seem equally negative and pointless as well. I figured eventually I started spending more time in the banter than getting anything out of it.

For now I have opted to use email newsletters as the way to go for this. Since there is no social aspect and it is already curated it is pretty crisp

These are the ones I’m using on regularly now

Daily basis:

1. Morning Brew ( US centric) gives you a concise summary of what happened yday, it is like a news paper you can read in 5 mins. Plus it has good humor too.
2. Quartz Daily brief ( for evening time)
3. Abnormal Returns – some really awesome articles selected on daily basis
4. Axios AM

Once in a week or month

1. Benedict Evans newsletter on tech
2. REDEF newsletter
3. Brain Food ( by Shane Parish)
4. Om Malik’s newsletter