An interesting Twitter exchange between Googlers Matt Cutts and Tim Bray:
A great article about why you should consider giving up news: http://t.co/p32BilNFxc
@mattcutts Except for, the world is run by people who care about what’s going on in it. Want to be one of them, or not?
@timbray all I know is the two times I’ve given up news/social media for 30 days have been among my most productive months. 🙂
If you follow the adventures of Matt Cutts, you no doubt know that he regularly engages in “30 day challenges,” in which he spends a month focusing on some goal. For January, his challenge was “no news, no Twitter, fewer emails, and no social media in general”). It was a quiet time for Google algorithm update news to say the least.
“In general, when I wanted to hop onto Techmeme or Google News or Hacker News or Twitter/Nuzzel, instead I opened up my to-do list,” Cutts wrote of his experience. “As a result, I got a ton of stuff done in January. I quickly learned that if something important was happening, I’d hear about it from someone else.”
The article Cutts points to in the tweet above comes from The Guardian, and is called, “News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier”.
According to that, news: misleads, is irrelevant, has no explanatory power, is toxic to your body, increases cognitive errors, inhibits thinking, works like a drug, wastes time, makes us passive, and kills creativity.
It’s an interesting read. I’ll give it that.