starseerdrgn | Reducing the noise

Earlier today, I took some actions to reduce the noise in my life.

I disabled notifications on my phone for Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, XMPP, and everything else that was not important.
I disabled constant notifications for XMPP on my desktop. If I am set to away, I see little to nothing.
I removed more than 50% of my RSS feeds from Thunderbird, almost all of them from Tumblr.
I reduced the podcasts I pull down.
I have reduced how much I use social media and cloud services, especially Twitter.

Now that the "too long; did not read" section is finished, I shall go into detail.

My phone constantly beeped with notifications any time I received a message on social media or IM. I finally became tired of the interruptions, and decided to do something about it.

First of all, I turned off phone notifications from all of my social media accounts, as well as from IM services and games. The only notifications I receive are from SMS, my dialer, email, and Facebook Messenger (from only a few people). That is all.

Second, I turned on "mute notifications while set to away" in my XMPP client. This will help me take care of what I am doing when I set myself to away there. I do not really use other IM clients, so I do not have anything else to set this with.

Third, I removed a LOT of podcasts and RSS feeds. My RSS feeds list has been reduced from 68 to 31, with all but two feeds coming from Tumblr blogs, and I only have 8 podcasts within Zune: This Week in Tech, Security Now, This Week in Google, Windows Weekly, The New Screen Savers, The Web Platform, The Web Ahead, and Accidental Tech Podcast. That is all I have in regard to feeds. (Though I may add more that are relevant to my interests, like W3C feeds.)

Finally, I am using social media far less now, especially Twitter. I checked Twitter once all day, and Facebook only a few times (mostly due to a game I play there). I have been striving to use the former far less that I used to, in order to get rid of both stress and distraction. Due to the lack of filtering and constant political talk there, I am growing tired of being unable to block it out without blocking people entirely.

Hopefully, these actions will end up helping both my stress and my problem with distractions.