We all encounter noise in our daily lives. What you consider noise one day may be perfectly necessary the next day. For me, noise is anything that I don’t want/need to hear AT THAT MOMENT. Here are 5 ways to reduce noise in your life:

1. Limit your time on Anti-Social Networking sites – I used to be a big fan of Facebook until I deleted my account a few months ago. In my case, everytime I logged into Facebook someone was either complaining or sending me pointless invites and propaganda. So it was an easy decision to just delete my account (which is different than just canceling…google it). I’m still a big fan of Twitter, as well as many forums, blogs,  and business networking sites. But if you’re like me you need to just UN-HOOK sometimes. If you’re on twitter, a great way to minimize noise is to create a list of the few people that you actually do read their tweets. I have a list of about 10 people from church that I actually check in on throughout the day…then I only check the rest of my follows once a day. For help on creating a twitter list you can click here. Also, I have a few people who tweet so often that I don’t actually follow them but instead subscribe to their twitter feed via RSS. Just go to the person’s twitter profile and on the right side click the RSS icon. This enables me to have all of that person’s tweets show up in my Google Reader so I can scroll through them once a week or so (NOTE: You do NOT show up as a follower of the person if you do this, so don’t get offended if they don’t follow you back)
2. Set times to check your email – I know you’re important. I understand that at any minute the son of the deposed king of Nigeria could send you an email requesting help that requires immediate attention. But I’ve discovered that I don’t miss anything if I set 3 or 4 times per day when I will check my email. For you, it may work better to just say you’ll check it once per hour or once per day…but give yourself a break from the interruptions. If you receive email on your cell phone then find a way to stop the alerts for periods of the day. Everything does not require your immediate attention so don’t give it!
3. Turn off your Instant Messaging – In my experience Instant Messaging is one of the biggest sources of interruption and noise during the day. By Instant Messaging (IM) I am referring to any Facebook chat, Gmail, Gtalk, Skype, AIM, Yahoo, Myspace IM, and one of the biggest being TEXT MESSAGING. By definition, IM’s are messages that you send/receive instantly. It’s the equivalent if you being able to walk into your boss’s office at any minute and talk about whatever you want. I believe the thinking behind creating IMing went something like this: “I want to send Ricky an email…but he might not get that until he gets done caring for his elderly Grandmother and that could take about 30 minutes! I KNOW…I will send a message that will make his cell phone AND computer alert him and he will have to leave Grandmother’s side to help me with uploading a video to Youtube.” I’m actually a big fan of texting and IM but it can be a big source of noise in your life if you don’t place some restrictions on it. One thing I do with my cell is place it on vibrate during the night. I will spend time with my family or friends interruption free and then I might check for text messages before going to bed. Also, you can call me a jerk but you don’t have to respond to every IM or Text I send you…Hint: I will never know you were at your computer when I sent it.
4. Pick a news provider and limit your intake - The news will make you crazy. I don’t watch news on television unless its on DVR so that I can skip through the nonsense. 90% of my news comes from online news sources that I subscribe to by RSS. Also, if you follow the right people Twitter can be a great source of news. For you reading the paper each morning might work better, but whatever you do don’t leave your television or radio on the news all day long. Lots of noise, very little of it is positive.
5. Stop asking people “How are you?” – Let’s face it, 99% of really don’t want to know even when we ask so why take the chance? At least once a day you run the risk of finding that person that got the email, IM, Text, and watched CNN for 2 hours and now they have a chance to unload some of it on YOU. If you genuinely want to know how someone is doing then by all means, but “How are you?” as a salutation is pretty useless. You can’t un-hear what someone tells you so you could be setting yourself up for a rough day. Some alternate suggestions might be “Hey! insert name here” or “Top of the morning to you (if it is in fact morning)”. Just make sure it doesn’t end with a question mark, which is often an invitation for noise.

What about you? What techniques do you employ to reduce the noise in your life?