Cleaning Up the Noise

Sometimes you go through periods where you feel like your life is full of a bunch of noise, and you’re not able to hear anything clearly. I’ve been in that place lately. So, in an effort to clean up some of the noise in my life, I’ve done a few things intentionally lately…

1. I unsubscribed from almost every mailing list I’m on
   I’ve tried doing something like this before, but I find myself justifying keeping a lot of them but really not reading many of them. If it’s something that I interact with regularly (like church info, etc) then I kept it, but otherwise, it was gone. This started clearing out a lot of the junk emails the clutter up my inbox, but I hardly ever read.
2. I cleared out some of the people I follow on Twitter
   I’ve gone back and forth on this, but as much as I love Twitter, there are times when I’m wading through a lot of stuff I don’t want to care about to find out about things I do. It ends up just being more and more noise. No offense, if you were one of the ones who got booted…just something I needed to do. I probably need to clear out a few more still. Some of you are able to handle more of this than I am. You’re just better than me.
   Brad Lomenick had some great, simple suggestions on what makes one Twitter more worth following than another.
3. I cleaned up my office
   Such a little thing, but I realized it was so easy to justify my desk and office getting swamped because of my schedule that it made everything I was doing feel more cluttered. It’s amazing how spending 30 minutes cleaning up and organizing can help to give me a more clear head when I’m working.
4. I stepped up my commitment to GTD
   When I don’t have a trusted system for keeping me organized, I feel more frazzled. I decided I needed to get a little bit more hardcore with using GTD as my organizational system. (by the way, Shawn Wood has a great set of short videos detailing out a GTD system if you’re interested…start with #1 and work your way through them)
5. I changed my prayer focus
   I noticed myself lately slowly shifting how I was praying towards a asking God to bless what I was doing instead of having more of a posture of surrender. Having a posture of surrender has made a huge difference for me in clearing up some of the superfluous noise

I don’t know about you, but every so often I have to go through these periods where I get really intentional to clear up the noise and clutter in my life.

What’s something that you’ve done that’s been helpful for you in cleaning up the noise?