Keeping up with the news right now is stressful—but it's also never been more important. One thing I've found helpful is reading information directly from primary sources.

For example: the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out news releases every day, and there's an RSS feed for those updates. Many state and local governments offer similar feeds.

Instead of visiting them every day you can set up a daily email with links to these updates. Here's a quick template for setting up an automated workflow—which we call a Zap—to do just that.

Click the button to get started. If all you want are the CDC updates, just go ahead and follow the prompts and click Continue. You'll have to create a Zapier account, if you don't already have one, and you'll need to enter your email address in the third step.

You will then get a daily email with links to every CDC release from the last 24 hours.

You can add as many RSS feeds to this setup as you want, including feeds from local news sources or state governments. You'll need to adjust the first step of this Zap: select New Items in Multiple Feeds from the Choose App & Event section of the first step.

Click Continue, then add the CDC RSS feed (https://tools.cdc.gov/api/v2/resources/media/403372.rss) as the first feed URL. Now you can add as many COVID-specific feeds as you want to flesh out your custom newsletter. Finding these feeds can be tricky, so here's how to find an RSS feed for almost any site. You could also add the World Health Organization's (WHO) releases: https://www.who.int/rss-feeds/news-english.xml.

Once you've added all your feeds, click Continue, then advance through all of the steps to test your email.

You've now built a custom newsletter for yourself, pulling information from a variety of sources that you trust. You can customize this feed whenever you want by editing the Zap, meaning you can add and remove sources whenever you want.