Content: let it come to you

This post has been repurposed from an email I sent to Habib Haddad after a chat we recently had about the same topic.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/dskley

One of the best things that I managed to do in the past couple of years is to switch my content consumption habits from a discovery approach to a neatly-packaged one (newsletters), which saved me many hours every week of random browsing of websites, Twitter, Facebook, etc. with the expected high noise-to-signal ratio.

Some of the great benefits of sticking to newsletters is:

• You come to learn approximately how long it will take you to go through each newsletter which allows you to budget time accordingly
• It stops you from getting sucked in informational black holes
• No more guilt of missing out on stuff when you’re busy. because out of sight = out of mind

This is my current regimen:

• Launch Ticker: 2 curated email newsletters a day that summarize the top tech news. This saves me from at least 30–60 mins of visiting the usual sources or checking Twitter
• Mattermark: a daily newsletter that is less news and more thought pieces that cover both the VC side and the startups. It’s probably my top source for learning new stuff about various things
• Medium newsletter: Medium uses your Twitter social graph as a start and compiles a daily newsletter than contains the top stories that are either written or recommended by people you follow. I’ve noticed a significantly higher quality of content in Medium posts vs. other sources
• Product Hunt: their very useful daily newsletter makes sure I don’t miss out on the latest hot products. I also subscribe to their Books one and Podcasts
• Quora: yes, Quora is still around and they send a daily newsletter with a selection of the top topics that fall under my interests. Their algorithm knows quite well how to pick those topics as I end up clicking through most of them
• Next Draft: nice mix of news & pieces on various topics, always full of interesting tidbits that I don’t encounter anywhere else
• In addition to a few thematic newsletters: Startup Health, Rock Health and Brain pickings