We are in the data and information revolution. Before that was the Industrial Revolution. In this revolution, one of the core themes is a gluttony of content and information. Getting someone to look at you or your brand is how money is made now.
In a landscape that has too much content to pay attention to, the loudest, most intrusive, emotionally stimulating piece of content gets your attention. This does not always mean the highest qualified content. Social media networks will test content on a few thousand individuals and if those few thousand engage, they’ll share that content with millions of other similar users.
All media companies test for and seek out content that will disrupt your life so that you will stay on their platform longer. Because there is so much content to pay attention to, companies aren’t held accountable for their manipulations or their deceit. If one company is being deceptive, it’s a target. If hundreds or thousands of companies are using deception to try and get engagement with their content, that’s the normal state, and it’s the current state of media today.
Facebook would rather show you an article about World War 3 instead of one about the health benefits of ice baths because they know we pay attention to threats more than benefits. They want our attention. And they have it.
The contents of content
Quality content that adds value but doesn’t oversell itself is often lost amongst the millions of other pieces of content screaming and begging for attention, lying for attention, because today lying is an acceptable part of media. There are no ethics in media anymore; there is only engagement.
Most content serves to take your focus away from your life and towards content because your focus is what makes media companies money. Unfortunately, content-creating companies are masters of stealing your focus and wasting your time. We need to be diligent and intentional with our focus to make progress in our lives and down our paths.
The ability and willingness to Defend your focus is a requirement in the current revolution of data and information. One method to defend your focus is organizing your content consumption into one day, like reading The Sunday Paper, which in the past was the largest paper of the week.
The paper came every day, but the juiciest, thickest paper with the most content came on Sunday. Many folks would only get the Sunday Paper, forgoing consuming content on other days of the week. Others would get the daily paper and use it to start fires after reading one section, waiting for Sunday to engorge on content.
If you think about it, a tablet, like an iPad is a slate of information. A slate of content. A newspaper is a foldable content slate. Before that, society wrote content on animal skins, and before that, stone.
The content tablet has existed for thousands of years.
Excess food and food of poor quality makes you obese and causes health problems. Excess information and information of poor quality makes you mentally obese(stupid) and causes lifestyle problems.
The Sunday Paper Method
Instead of checking social media daily, reading articles every day, checking links, and being pulled by clickbait headlines, concentrate all or most of your content consumption on one day per week.
The Sunday Paper method.
This does not mean you only watch television or podcasts on Sunday. Instead, think of Sunday as your day to check social media and read articles that were the best of the past week.
Throughout the week you can create a list of content you want to read for your Sunday Paper. When Sunday comes, you may only consume a few pieces of content you have collected because low-value, timely information has a short expiration date.
If you are constantly checking social media and reading news every day, you’re part of the testing population that determines what gets shown to people who check media less. The people who check social media less get to see the best of the best, the most engaging content, which of course will include some low-value content, but most of it should be the content that is highest value.
If you are a Wall Street Journal reader for example, you can still check the WSJ daily in the morning, but your deep-dive reads can happen on Sunday. This way, the publication’s audience will curate the most important stories of the week. You have a lower chance of consuming misinformation this way. You will also waste less time with low-value content because the audience who gets there first figures out where the value is for the publication.
Media providers do not prioritize accuracy, they prioritize being first. So if you’re consuming information every day, as opposed to the majority on Sunday, you are getting a significant amount of misinformation because publishers publish while they are still figuring things out. Worse, if you consume misinformation, you may miss the corrected forms of that information that publish later. By consuming most of your media one day per week, the stories should be mostly figured out after audiences and algorithms have six days to determine the value and truthfulness of that content.
If you read blogs like this one, you can use an RSS reader like Feedly to aggregate all your media sources into a literal Sunday Paper. Feedly works perfectly with the free version; an example of valuable software. You can start building your Sunday paper in a few minutes.
Each of your content feeds will have all the content that publisher published in the past week. You’ll be able to see the most popular pieces of content, which may be a signal for the most valuable content. You’ll also be able to pick and choose from a larger amount of articles to determine what you read.
Feedly allows you to save articles for later. You can look at articles whenever you have free time and save a curated list to read through on your Sunday Paper.
You can organize your publishers into categories which creates sections of the Sunday Paper. The total amount of articles are shown next to the category. You can view all of your articles at once, category by category, or publisher by publisher. The convenience is unmatched.
Using this method you can follow as many publications as you like, and read them like sections of a Sunday Paper. When people read the Sunday Paper, they don’t read an entire category front to back. Instead, they pick and choose what interests them from the available published content.
Takeaway
The Sunday Paper method allows you to pick content from ALL the publications you follow. Some publications may have one thing you want to read per month and the rest is garbage. But you still want to read that one article out of hundreds of other ones. Other publications you’ll want to read more of. The Sunday Paper Method collects all of the content from publishers you follow so you don’t miss anything important, but miss what is unimportant to you.
Try to concentrate your media consumption to one day per week.
Social media is bad for your health. The more social media you consume, the more anxiety, depression, stress, and anger you will feel. Social media is an addiction that doesn’t make us feel good. We should do our best to limit what does not make us feel good about the world or ourselves.
We want to spend more time on our paths and less time generating income for corporations who do not care about us. Some may care. most will not.