Be Informed
With a busy life it is hard to keep up to speed on current events and happenings. But it’s an important thing to do. Here are some sneaky ideas for staying well-informed on the fly:
- Podcasts from your favorite news outlet are oh-so-efficient and fun. Usually they are specially recorded, concise, and without advertisements. You can be informed about the general how’s and why’s of the world in under thirty minutes. On NPR.org you can download podcasts on religion, politics, the arts and science. Your favorite radio station in town may offer a daily podcast with news and a few songs tossed in for entertainment – an easy way to jumpstart the brain.
- Has everyone at work been talking about Anna Karenina and you can’t figure out who this mysterious chick is? Time for Audible.com! Download all those classics you meant to read but never got around to, self-help books, best sellers. You’ll look very well read. Plus you can also download daily versions of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and additions of the New Yorker and Harvard Business Review.
- Remember back in the day before podcasts and downloadable books? What did we do for information? Several of the old fashioned options still hold strong today: listen to the radio, read the paper, watch the news. Duh. But in our over-scheduled world the obvious does bear repeating.
- Multi-task your way to knowledge by combining news with exercise, commuting or cleaning. I watch the news every morning at the gym. I arrive at work feeling fit, knowing the weather on both coasts, and the top news of the morning. Not bad.
- With all the big stuff going on in the world today you can’t know current information about everything. One alternative is to choose to be really well informed about some things and less knowledgeable about others. Aim to have a general idea of what’s happening at home and what the U.S. is doing here and elsewhere. Strive to be a with-it, contributing citizen and consumer, and if you have to have someone else explain the mechanics of bio-diesel, that’s ok.
