Messages fly at us from all directions.  There are good messages like emails from bosses, wall posts by friends, @replys by followers, and text messages from family.  Then there are the bad ones like the newsletters we subscribed to 3 years ago, spam from groups on Facebook, and the plethora of tweets from Ashton Kutcher.

This past decade has brought us innovations that keep us more connected and as a result we can be closer with people that are farther away. With one click we can send a photo via email.  Or even better share that photo on Facebook and our entire network gets a glimpse into our lives.

The unfortunate byproduct of all the connectedness is the noise that occurs as well.  By definition, noise is any activity that can disturb communication.

We have intentionally and unintentionally oversubscribed ourselves to things.  We intentionally subscribed to the daily newsletter from UrbanDaddy. We were unintentionally added to status update emails at work.  Noise are activities that we cannot directly take action on.

Out of the 300 emails and 200 status updates a day, there are only a handful that are actionable.  Filtering out the noise is a necessity.  Setting up email filters for newsletters and distribution lists is the easiest way to divert excess messages from your inbox.  The next is to filter out notifications from services like Facebook, Sharepoint, and Twitter into separate folders as well.

All these manual steps are painstaking, but make our inboxes lighter and more manageable.  Ideally innovations in the future will find ways to automatically filter out noise, just like spam is moved today.  Based on my actions, my inbox will know which messages are important and which ones I can afford to see later.