When I hear a newscaster say, “Tonight we have breaking news…,” my heart races a bit. It’s no secret that the news these days is completely overwhelming. If we’re not careful, we can easily get bogged down in news reports of crises and chaos from around the world — so bogged down that we can lose hours of our productive days as well as time with our families.

But I’m not telling you guys anything you don’t know already, right?

Here are a handful of tools that can help you curate your own news and control the news noise that heads your way. What are your favorites?

1. Flipboard
   I’ve made no secret of the fact that I adore Flipboard. For curating your favorite topics and news, I just haven’t found anything better. Flipboard lets you create little magazines that you, well, flip through. I have a public board for technology that I call Nerdy News. I was kinda impressed that I had quite a few followers, until I saw that my board for Recipes that I accidentally forgot to mark as private has about twice as many followers. So much for being a nerd expert, right? Luckily I can find nerdy recipes like these Wonder Woman donuts that marry the two topics together. 🙂
   
2. News360
   News360 is a smart content aggregator that learns what content you like and searches out more stories that might interest you. You can personalize your feed, tweak your topics and save articles for viewing offline.
   
   
3. Feedly
   You don’t need a fancy-schmancy magazine format to collect all your favorite news sources. Feedly is more of an old school content aggregator that lets you add your favorite blogs, topics and news sites. People flocked to it after the Google Reader died (RIP). It’s a great way to stay in the know.
4. SmartNews
   If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of clicking on a news link only to wait and wait and wait for the page to load, you’re going to love SmartNews. The service aggregates news from multiple major sources, but it’s secret sauce is the super-fast story loading that lets you get your updates in seconds, not minutes. ‘Cuz who has minutes to spare these days?
   
5. TheSkimm
   Love it or hate it, TheSkimm is a major source of news for millions of followers. It’s a daily newsletter that summarizes and explains the day’s headlines in, well, quirky terms. The news comes out a little snarky, a little simplistic but a whole lot funny. People adore it. Check out how TheSkimm covered Hurricane Irma news as well as the Catalonia’s vote for independence from Spain.