Churners and MSers are a generally shrewd group of optimizers, within reason. There’s not enough hours in the day to run every possible play you can think of, especially if you work a 9-5. 

There aren’t enough hours in the day for keeping up with the torrent of churning information that comes out every day, either. 

Before you even proactively seek information, your inbox is likely filled with hotel bonus point promos, airline sales, award notifications, even rants from some crazy blog called Chasing Cetaceans.

At the blog level, there’s thousands and thousands of blogs out there, many of which post multiple times a day (sometimes about the same thing).

On public forums, reddit, Flyertalk, USCF, and a wealth of Facebook groups (of varying levels of usefulness) there are thousands of posts made per day. 

Finally, private groups can ebb from being quiet to on fire 24/7 depending on the group, the day of the week, and what news is coming out of 200 Vesey St.

Regardless of what level of churner you are, you have a veritable firehose of questions, chatter, data points, and (maybe) signal hitting you daily. 

Today, I woke up to over 3k unread WhatsApp messages, 800 unread Telegram messages and 200k+ unread emails (although I’ll admit I don’t practice inbox zero) and I’m far from winning the “most churning communities” award. And that’s before catching up on Discord, Slack, etc. 

That’s an insane amount of information to sift through, especially when you don’t know if an unexpected spike of messages in a normally quiet group is discussion of a time sensitive opportunity or chatter around marketplace drama. 

So, what’s the best way to prioritize your reading, especially if you don’t have unlimited time to devote to stare at a screen? 

For me, I’ve always tried to identify the channel or platform that hits the perfect balance for my knowledge level at that point in time (with a goal of leveling up in mind) while remaining (somewhat) easy to digest. 

For example, as a beginner, I prioritized reddit over Flyertalk because /r/churning was more about initial card strategies vs. advanced fuel dumping and even the DD/DQ threads beat the hell out of the Flyertalk forum structure. 

In theory, as time goes on and you grow in that community, you’ll eventually hit a point that you’ve learned enough to move up a level while also making the connections necessary to do so. 

Once that happens, you’ll find yourself checking the previous source a little bit less and less, and your new one will become your daily driver. This doesn’t mean you ignore places that you once found helpful, but just that you wait until you have a few slow minutes to see what is being discussed. 

You can continue to rinse and repeat as you grow in the hobby and make more friends – that way you can ensure that your community is focused on the things most relevant to you. Let’s illustrate this using our good friends at aforementioned Vesey St. address:

• Amex eliminating a coupon would be discussed ad nauseam by big blogs and public forums and be largely undiscussed in private groups
• Amex changing their application rules would be covered everywhere, because this is relevant to everyone playing the game
• Amex shutting down a large group would be covered in both public forums and private groups, but would be covered by only a couple of blogs

There’s nothing wrong with belonging in some of these groups and not others – for example, the /r/creditcards crew is aggressively optimizing their share of wallet. Losing access to Saks or Dell might make the math change, and that is something that needs to be discussed. The big blogs need to talk about it because it affects their affiliate income. 

And on the flip side, if you’re a big fish and it’s a bad day to be a big fish, you need to be in the right channel to discuss what happened. But if you aren’t a big fish, this isn’t going to affect you, and there’s no need to stress out about it, even if it’s blowing up in public channels. 

Finally, one other thing I’d consider is the culture of the community. Some people like to banter and make friends, while other people are treating this as a business the chatter. Again, there’s nothing wrong with either of those, but I’d choose one that fits your personality best. 

Good luck headed into Q2 friends.

Emweir!

Pictured: a churner after sharing a high-level whale’s isolated shutdown DP in the Daily Discussion thread