How To Get Your Facts Right, Fast

Get-your-facts-right“Don’t read, watch or listen to any news if you want to get things done. News just distract you by making you worried about stuff that most likely doesn’t affect you anyway.”
This one productivity tip is floating around in the interwebs for a while now. I don’t agree. I think it is important to stay informed about what is going on around us.

Whether these news worry us, however, is a choice we make. When we want to succeed in life we’ll sooner or later have to make decisions. We’ll also have to learn to live with inconvenient and unfortunate events and news in our own lives and have to decide how to handle them and how to react to them. Building an opinion on various topics that are in the news is therefore an excellent exercise in decision making.

For that we have to consider pros and cons until we reach a decision about how we think about a topic. We should approach important decision in our lives at least with the same caution. So no harm in practicing how to get a round view of a topic, right? (more…)