A Schedule in Consuming Media
Nowadays, I've come up with a new schedule and rotation on how I consume media.
In the mornings, there are only two news morning briefing I read – one from SF Chronicle and the other from The Guardian. Both of them sit pretty in my inbox every morning, so at 8 AM I'm forced to read them first thing after I hit stop on my alarm.
When I'm finally settled down in front of my work laptop (with out without coffee), I go over my Youtube feed to see if any of my subscriptions posted anything new in the last 24 hours since I've been online. I rarely watch every video, and instead I pick and choose which ones I feel like watching for the day (mostly around 5-10, short ones), make a playlist out of them, and then let those play in the background while I go about doing my morning tasks.
In the afternoon, I switch over to podcasts. Never mind if I don't finish the playlist – I save it with the day's date and then finish that the following day. For podcasts, I have a running queue that I add things to daily – again, I don't listen to every episode that just came out. I slightly bump up the news and political episodes to the top so they stay relevant, but everything else are sequential – things like Second Date Update, to Nobody Panic, to Every Little Thing.
Recently, I've come to appreciate Zoom webinars, so I schedule a few every now and then, mostly at the latter part of the afternoon. I find out about them through the various newsletters I'm subscribed to, and each time I come in there (muted and no video), not expecting anything – but somehow I get sucked in to listening to the live conversations, 45 minutes pass by and I'm completely absorbed.
I eat dinner. If I'm hanging out with my boyfriend, you could bet that we're chowing down on pizza while intently watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine – which is growing on me. Before that, we've been cycling through episodes of the Office or Star Trek The Next Generation (which I've also come to love). If I'm by myself, I put on either a random movie or the next episode of the anime or show I'm currently into – right now, it's Kuroko no Basuke. Next week, I'll make sure I've started on Toradora.
At around 9 or 10, even if when I'm not absolutely sleepy, I pick up the book on my nightstand. Sometimes I merely go along with the flow of the book and end up reading for an hour, but for those that are excruciatingly painful to read (and that I haven't given up yet), I set a 30 minute timer.
Pointless and aimless scrolling is, finally, reserved in the last few minutes of my day, just before I go to sleep.