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.