Signal To Noise
Have you ever considered your personal signal-to-noise ratio?
In-Bound
Email messages
Media
Internet sites
Twitter, Facebook and other social network feeds
Conversation topics of peers
Business partners and teammates
Just like with areas for self-improvement, it's a lot easier to spot the in-bound sources of noise than the ones that I'm creating. What about out-bound noise?
What I write
What I think
What I say
What I post
What I tweet
In terms of my own noise generation, my two year experiment with inbox zero has trained me to ask:
do I need to read this;
what does this person need from me; and
to trim what hits my inbox.
I sure wish that same discipline came naturally on the larger internet. About the only way I can figure to free myself is rationing.
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Three random bits that might help:
The Big Picture does a daily email round up on business reading. Barry embeds the Mauldin letter that I like. If I'm honest with myself then Barry's email is all I need to stay abreast of the "signal" aspect of the financial media, I don't even need to read past the headlines.
My last piece prompted Steve to share this video on The Seven Year Itch. I'm going to take a sabbatical in 2013 and will be spending 2012 figuring out how to structure it. If you have resources for me to consider then please send them along.
I was running with my buddy, Scott Jones, and we ended with a question, "what aspects of my life do I take as a given when, in reality, they are self-imposed constructs".
Working on that last one.
Happy Holidays and I'll be back in 2012.