10 Feb 2009

Reducing the Noise

I’m spending some time tonight to try and reduce some of the noise in my life. From a practical standpoint, this means I’m:

  • Unsubscribing from a few RSS feeds that I end up just reading past anyway
  • Deleting some iTunes tracks that I usually end skipping, both at my desk and in my car (the Skip Count in iTunes is great for this)
  • Unsubscribing from a few mailing lists I rarely read, are definitely not active in, and end up just Google searching when I need a topical answer
  • Taking steps to reduce blog spam
  • Creating server-side and client-side rules to move bulk e-mail from companies like Dell to their own folder or tag, and skipping the inbox altogether. Even better, unsubscribing from most of these completely.
  • Deleting rarely used Apps

While these minor things seem really trivial piece-by-piece, I think the sum of them cause a lot of distraction and cloud meaningful activities. As such, I plan to do this de-lousing on a periodic basis.