I'm trying to fix my “staying informed” workflow, but I still spend way too long hunting for news
I've been trying to fix my "staying informed" workflow, and honestly I'm not sure I've cracked it.
I set up AI to send me a daily digest of what's been happening — which helps. But I still end up spending a lot of time wandering around different sites, checking whether there's some big news I missed. The digest gives me a baseline, but it doesn't kill the FOMO, so I keep manually poking around anyway.
And here's the part that's been bugging me more lately: as AI gets more powerful, everyone is guarding their data more tightly. Paywalls, aggressive anti-scraping, login walls, bot detection — it's all going up fast. So the slightly ironic result is that the more capable AI becomes, the narrower the slice of the internet it can actually read for me. A lot of the good stuff is increasingly behind walls that my tools just bounce off of.
So I'm genuinely curious how everyone here handles this:
Where do you actually get your news and updates from? (Newsletters, X/Twitter lists, Discord/Slack communities, RSS, specific people, something else?)
Do you rely on AI digests/agents, and if so, do they actually save you time — or do you still end up double-checking manually like I do?
And has anyone found a good way around the "AI can see less and less of the web" problem?
Would love to steal your setups. 🙏
Replies
This resonates deeply. I've gone through a similar loop — set up AI digests, felt productive for a week, then found myself back on Twitter "just checking" because the digest felt too clean, too filtered.
What actually helped me was accepting that FOMO isn't a workflow problem, it's a psychological one. No tool fully solves it. So I stopped trying to capture everything and started curating ruthlessly instead. I now follow around 15 specific people on X who are upstream of the news I care about — founders, researchers, a few journalists. When something big happens, they're talking about it before the headlines hit. That reduced my wandering time significantly.
On the paywall issue — I've noticed newsletters are becoming my workaround. Good writers summarize paywalled content with their own take, which often matters more than the original article anyway. It's indirect access, but surprisingly effective.
Curious though — when you say your AI digest "helps but doesn't kill FOMO," is it the coverage gaps that bother you, or the lack of context around why something matters?