How do you stay up to date on what’s important aka what will make you money without spending way too much time consuming noise?
My solution is information streams. I set up various stream that surface important information so that I don’t need to seek it. It saves me an absurd amount of time.
This includes people who write to me when specific things in their field change, a WhatsApp group of relocation consultants, and monitoring lots of German laws for changes with Wachete. I also follow the monthly changes gazette from the German government. This covers 90% of what I need to know.
I am now designing a tool to gather feedback from my readers about unobservable things such as the processing times at the immigration office. This would be insanely valuable to people who apply for a residence permit.
In summary, I automate the surfacing of important information, and make sure the updates come at a reasonable frequency, with as little noise as possible.
For everything else, I just don’t care. Knowing the latest and greatest in tech does not affect my income. I can build valuable things with old, boring tech.
There is too munch information being created every day to possibly keep up. Pick a couple sources you like and forget about the rest. If something is important enough, and you happen to miss it, someone will tell you about it.
HN has smart folk but it's particularly bad for web3, AI, and startups. Reddit is below average on everything, but better than HN on those topics. Lemmy tends to lean more towards web3 and FOSS. TikTok covers newer things. YouTube goes deepest, but you don't always need depth. The shorter the video, the more noise it needs.
You could set up a Google Alert to have the news delivered to you in your inbox. There are probably other services like that as well.
Just make sure you select the right settings (language, sources etc).
Or select a few trustworthy newsletters on topics that matter to you. If you find that you are not reading them (not enough time), then unsubscribe.
Sorry, but I don’t care what’s happening in the USA, or the Middle East, or anywhere for that matter. I don’t care about the latest celebrity death. I don’t. Care. At. All. I don’t care about your politics unless it affects me, my family, or friends.
Media is manipulation.
I care about what I can see around me with my own eyes, and I care about programming and computer science. I care about my own small community I live in. I research what I care about.
I don’t need to stay upto date with anything else.
Neither do you, don’t be a sheep. Most people are sheep. Unplug yourself and live life undistracted.
Why do you need to stay up to date?
For money?
Why will keeping “up to date” bring you money? If you do the same as others do, you’re going down well-trodden paths. You’re not differentiating yourself or your mind from others if you consume the same media.
I’ve made money from software, I build software others consider impossible to monetise (extensions).
I did that by not “staying upto date” and by consuming and building different to the majority.
Forge your own path and don’t consume media. 99.9% of it is noise. Even hacker news is mostly noise.