I consume medias mainly on PC, Kindle,Mobile phone,TV,printed media and organic relation (oral:talking with people, physical:dance workshop). I used “Rescue Time” for my PC, and as for other medias, I took notes and summed them up.

While setting up my PC for Rescue Time, I encountered something very surprising.

On Rescue Time, you categorize your activity on PC either as “distractive” or as  “productive”. Checking news is part of my work life for more than 20 years. So I categorized “News & Opinion” as “productive”. There came an alert “Most people categorize this as “distracting time”.

WHAAAAAT!! When I was on shift as a page editor, I had to read all 5 national newspapers from top to end  for 3 hours in early morning before go to work. And you call it “distracting time”!  (Of course you can persist and set it up as “productive” in Rescue Time)

OK! Calm down. Here is a very important key for news industry. People want to be productive. But most people think reading news or opinion as distracitve, because it’s passive, I guess. If we can let people consume news in productive way, there could be a break through for the future.

Let’s go back to homework. Here is the summary of the time I spent for the different media.(numbers are minutes I spent)

I spent702 min. for mail. Half of them are for the report and message sent back to Japan, so that is for business. “Oral” does not include chatting at the lunch, but group meeting.”Physical” refers to dance lesson and dance workshop.

As I have been working in the media industry, I tend to use both old and new media. If I put them on timeline, you can see different aspect.

I use mobile phone as an alarm clock. So I sleep with mobile and Kindle. Whenever I wake up at night, I check my mobile for news. When earthquake happen while I am sleeping , I usually wake up at the primary wave and check the data and news on mobile. If it is bigger than M5, I turn on TV and PC.Thus the first screen I see in the morning is mobile.

Then I check TV news. First CNN, surfing through big networks then lands on CNN again.

During daytime, I use mainly PC, but also mobile when I am on move.The evening time is for printed media and Kindle. The last screen I see is mobile again.

This pattern is created after a long time of experience. If anything big happens, I have to go to the newsroom, I have to make phone calls.

How do I choose the media I consume?

I spent 140 minutes, which is almost a quarter of time I spent for media, at the media introduced through social media. They are mainly technology and business information.

There are several news sites and data site which I constantly check. It is like police car checking several points on patrol. There I check top stories and then shop around. It is like “Things to do ” list.  This patter must be quite different from young people, but having several media which I need to check for work, I cannot help.