The News versus the Dashboard
What if every day when you woke up, the first thing you saw was useful information about yourself and your community instead of the worst news in the world that could be found that day? What if the information you focused on was local and useful instead of distant and demoralizing? You would be more optimistic and focused on things in your control, and you would ultimately be more productive and fulfilled. This is a concept Balaji Srinivasan introduced.
It’s a pretty novel idea, so it’s worth exploring at length.
What’s wrong with the news?
People spend a lot of time on the news. Some of the time is first thing in the morning, which is a time with a lot of potential. And it’s not just traditional newspapers that people spend time on. Scrolling Twitter is another way to read the news. I spend about half an hour a day on Twitter on my phone, which seems to be about average in the US. A person can do a lot in 30 minutes every day. So if the news isn’t good for you, that’s a real problem.
First of all, it’s not even clear what we get out of the news. It is supposed to be useful, somehow. But is it? It occupies a strange place, kind of entertainment, kind of educational. There is probably a lot of overestimation of how educational it is, post-hoc rationalization of scrolling what is largely an entertainment feed.
The news is mostly irrelevant to you. Looking at the New York Times today, August 30th, 2022, I see an article on a death in Navy SEAL training, a coffee stand in New York City, Ukraine stepping up strikes against Russia, how CBD might help with insomnia, and detective stories reflecting the values and anxieties of different areas. It is interesting, certainly. It’s meant to be interesting, and it delivers. But what’s the point, what’s the purpose in reading this? What do I do with this information? A common answer is to be an informed citizen. OK, but does an informed citizen need to track so many different things in so much detail? Probably not.
As scattered as the stories seem, they are serving an agenda. Not your agenda, not exactly, though your chosen news sources probably tend to match your views. It’s not even an explicit, honest agenda. They pretend to just be telling the truth, as honest, unbiased messengers. You are letting people with a somewhat aligned but unclear agenda set your agenda.
Whatever the agenda might be for your chosen sources, the overall tone is probably negative and pessimistic. The famous, blunt expression of this bias is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Does that seem healthy? Of course, there is not some grand conspiracy to produce negative news to bring everyone down. They’re just giving us what we want. Producing negative and shocking news is an easy way to keep people entertained and interested, which is probably pretty much what we’re looking for in the news.
What’s the solution?
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can set your own clear, explicit agenda, instead of following someone else’s veiled agenda. You can define a vision, quantify it, specify a path, and track your progress. You can be a definite optimist, not an indefinite pessimist. And you can work with a group of aligned people to define bigger goals and pursue them together.
A common way to achieve this kind of clarity in purpose and progress is a dashboard. Dashboards are commonly used in organizations like companies to quantify and achieve goals. They offer a shared map for people to follow together. Dashboards, broadly conceptualized, should probably be more of a focus for the average person than they are now. They should be getting some of the time that is currently spent on aimless scrolling.
Of course, there is value in reading the news, in learning about what’s going in the world. It just shouldn’t be the first thing a person looks at to start the day, and it shouldn’t become a mindless distraction that takes a lot of time. A person should start the day with what’s most important to them, taking action on their own agenda instead of looking for distractions.
Why dashboards?
While the news could be categorized as indefinitely pessimistic, the dashboard embodies definite optimism. The implicit message of the news might be: things are bad, they aren’t going to get better, and who knows how it will go wrong next. The implicit message of the dashboard is: this is what I want the future to be like, these are the measures that represent the future state, this is where I am now, and I will review the goal and current state regularly until I reach the goal.
While the news is scattered, the dashboard is focused and results-oriented. It is about the goals you chose, not narratives someone else is pushing. The dashboard is essentially relevant, while the news is really not.
The dashboard is hopeful. The news is essentially people commenting on what’s happening and not doing much about it. The dashboard reminds you that you have a better future state you are aiming at, you know what success looks like, and you are on your way.
There are many different examples of how this could work. While the word dashboard might bring to mind something complicated that requires a lot of setup, there is a wide range of solutions ranging from out-of-the-box and easy to custom and time-intensive.
I have played with many tools in this area, and have found habit-tracking apps to be a surprisingly good way to maintain a picture of my overall performance in the important areas of my life. Using one like Kin, I can choose from pre-made habits like “Bed in time” or “Wake up in time” or create my own. Then it’s just a matter of checking off the ones I’ve done each day. Completion percentage can be viewed daily, weekly, monthly, and beyond. The data entry is easy, but the reporting is powerful. Unlike a lot of the custom Notion and Google Sheets setups I’ve seen, this is something I can imagine the average person setting up and maintaining. Custom setups, of course, allow more detail and can be worth the effort.
Dashboards get really interesting when they are shared, when they align people towards a common vision. Then really great things can be accomplished. This is a mostly unsolved problem, outside of the context of businesses and other formal organizations.
Why now?
Every person has potential, a best use of their life. They should be focused on self-actualization, not distracted by crap or unwittingly drafted into someone else’s cause. This is especially important right now. In the rich world, in countries like the US, we live in an age of complacency and stagnation. Striving is discouraged. Optimism is mocked. Wasting human potential is all too common. In times like these, definite optimism is much-needed.
Fortunately, we have ample opportunity. This is a time of a million movements, communities, and niches. The Internet increases variance. It surfaces more different communities people can join and goals they can pursue. We’ve gone from three channels to hundreds of millions of Twitter accounts and thousands of subreddits. We have amazing tools for making information accessible and bringing people together.
Subreddits are perhaps the best-established way to form and cultivate online communities around specific themes. It enables the creation of communities around a great variety of niches that would have been harder to find before. Then there are the different communities on Twitter: Techno-Optimist Twitter, US Politics Twitter, and many others.
A million communities, but how many community projects? All that potential, all that time that could be more productively spent. Maybe this can be the decade of online communities leveling up, getting more focused and active in creating the world they want to see.
Crypto communities, with their lively Discord servers and tokens, are examples of vibrant, productive communities of globally distributed individuals working together towards a common vision. There is an explosion of experiments in lots of surprising directions, from forming a CityDAO to trying to buy a copy of the Constitution of the United States.
What can I do today?
Heady stuff. What can a person do today to move in this direction? You probably have some kind of goal. Come up with a metric to represent that goal and track progress towards it every day. The easiest way to do this is to use a habit-tracking app like Kin. You can select pre-made habits like “Get up in time”, “Go to bed in time”, “Work out” and track your progress with a few taps each day. It sounds simple and small, and it is. But this kind of action tends to compound into something substantial. Focusing more on goals by tracking them every day leads to more thought about the goals. More thought about the goals leads to more careful selection of which people to surround yourself with. Surrounding yourself with more aligned people ultimately empowers you to actualize yourself and achieve great things.
It’s essentially about choosing between being a passive observer of the world or an active contributor. A simple challenge: spend more tracking your progress towards your goals than you spend on aimless news consumption. Instead of checking Twitter periodically throughout the day, check your personal dashboard. The cycle of setting clear goals and holding yourself accountable can lead to amazing places, even to Mars if you’re Elon Musk. Don’t be a critic, be a builder. It starts with imagining something better, then it’s just a matter of commitment and ability.