How to Catch Up on the News in 10 Minutes a Day

Being informed does not require watching everything. It requires knowing the main events, understanding why they matter, and knowing where to go for more. That can be done in about ten minutes.

What you actually need to know

Most days, the number of developments that genuinely matter to a general reader is small. The rest is repetition, reaction and noise. A useful test is to ask, for each story: what is new, and what would change if I knew this? If the answer is nothing, skip it.

A ten-minute routine

Minutes 1 to 8: one broad pass

Use a single source that gives you the day's main events in one sitting. A well-made bulletin, newsletter or audio briefing works. The aim is orientation, not completeness. You want to come away able to say what happened and roughly why.

Minutes 9 to 10: choose one thing to follow up

Pick a story you want more on, and save the full article for later. Do not go looking now. The point of a short routine is that it stays short.

Tips that make it stick

• Attach it to something you already do. Coffee, the commute, the walk to work. Habits form more easily when they hang off an existing one.
• Use audio if your eyes are busy. Ten minutes of listening fits into moments that reading does not.
• Prefer sources that tell you what changed. If you followed a story yesterday, you want only the development, not the whole background again.
• Set the length, not the story count. Thinking in minutes keeps the habit predictable.
• Allow quiet days. Some days there is little to report. A short briefing on a quiet day is a feature.
• Check the sources. A summary is a starting point. Make sure you can reach the original reporting.

Where Murmur fits

Murmur delivers this as a daily audio briefing for iPhone. You choose the subjects you follow and the length, from a few minutes up to twenty, and it builds the brief around them. The developments you would be embarrassed not to know are included either way. When the briefing ends, the day's stories appear with what you heard and links to the newsrooms that reported them.

Related: what an audio news briefing is.