I've been reading news differently from normal person, for years I've been using Reddit and 9GAG for latest information, use controversial memes to puzzle the news. I often get distract, it's difficult to scroll through same series of memes at one time. Thus, I found myself end up scrolling random memes and forgot what I was looking for. Hense, I try to build my news reading habits more efficiently. Tried couple of RSS readers or even self-host it, but it seems too hard for me to check readers at the end of the day.
Atomic Habits come to rescue
Couple of days ago I got recommanded to read this book Atomic Habits, I look this book up on my Kobo reader and bought it. This book shows how to make a habit irresistible by combining your normal tasks with some habit you want to build. Such as you want to start a jogging habits, but you find yourself hard to do it. You can either jogging when you're walking your dog, or go for a run in the morning right before you pick up your mail. I do check my work email daily basis, how about put these two together? If I'm able to build a habit to read the newsletters after I checked my work email, I won't find myself scrolling random memes at the end of the day.
The Idea of combining different tasks to achieve build a new habit is the idea of this post title.
Emails and News, hmm.
Back in the day we used to subscribe to various newspapers / magazines and receive latest news everyday morning from your porch. Then the Internet kicks in hard. Newspapers and magazines are turn into digital form, people tend to check on their favorite websites for news. It become massively chaos lately because fake news are plaguing the news enviornment for traffic and advertisement. If you want to verify the article you see is legit you will have to go on various big media websites and trying to dig out the similar title from their lack of UI/UX websites. Some of them does not have a search box for it.
Thus an idea of reading news from email is pop in my head. Don't get me wrong, email subscription exists from the day internet is being form. Sadly it's too easy to retrieve email list from random people and just spam the useless information to someone's mailbox. All the paradox / scam / controversal letters piling up email service storage. Let's face it, the shape of email ecosystem is bad.
Let's do it with new mailbox.
It is HARD to clean your personal mailbox. Most of websites won't ask you if you want to subscribe their eDM when you registering, some of them even sends you email regardlessly even they promise they won't spam. All kinds of email from Amazon, Twitter and Facebook and even some random websites you never visits are already occupied your mailbox. It's too hard to unsubscribe each one of them and delete all those non-important email, while carefully avoid the email that you want to preserve at the same time.
Luckly register a new email account is fairaly easy, so I use my iCloud email alternative mailbox just for reciving news letters from various websites I tend to read. After awhile of enjoyment, disaster crawls back.
My newly created news only mailbox is filling up with random emails again! Somehow email junkies are able to retrieve my email from some website and start spaming my news mailbox and the source is spreading. Till the time I found out, my mailbox is already subscribe dozens of website. I have no clue that which website is giving my email out.
So I deleted my news mailbox, created another mailbox and subscribe only the majour media company, same thing happens again. The lack of trust of those media company already up to the point that I can't stand it anymore. Eventually I abandoned this idea for awhile.
Hop on Morning Brew
It's a Wednesday afternoon, I was browsing random videos on YouTube and this dude have sponsership from a company called Morning Brew. Suspose this company combine daily digest and latest news, fits it inside an email. I look it up a bit and found out this company is already exists for 25+ years. I went to their website and read some of their latest articles, it's really good that they shrink the most content out but still preserve the correct information, most importantly, no click bait.
Shortly after I subscribe their email news letters and I never look back.
MorningBrew did a great job by collecting all the information, and shink the content to not too long that you have to sit down and read, but fits for taking a bus or subway to work, or waiting in line for your morning coffee at your coffee shop.
After a few days of trying their service I found out they have more subject focued categories. I also subscribe their Sidekick for life management and productivity hacks, Emerging Tech Brew for most latest tech newsletters, and Money Scoop for personal finance newsletters. Only Morning Brew comes into your mailbox daily, Sidekick, Money Scoop and Emerging Tech Brew are twice-weekly. All Morning Brew's emails are in similar layout, easy to read and have links to the topic that you want to dig in more about. The overall reading experience are pleasant.
I'd like to recommand to everyone who want to save time from browsing all types of media websites. If you find yourself lost in different topic as you tended to, and find yourself diffcult to find the legit information, give Morning Brew a shot, I bet you won't regret it. And they truly won't spam your mailbox.
Referral Links
Here is the referral links from morning brew. By clicking this link it won't do anything else but records how many people I introduce to their services, as some rewards I could get some cute stickers!
You can find your referral links inside your Morning Brew emails and spread it to your families and friends too.
It is much appreciated if you decide to use my links for the first time you hop in :)
For daily news digest:
Morning Brew
For life management:
Side Kick
For finance:
Money Scoop
For tech:
Emerging Tech Brew
