You don’t have a lot of spare time. So if you want to be your best at work and at home, you’ve got to make room for the stuff that matters. From today forward, you must filter.
    Think about how much information is flooding in, fighting for your attention and emotion every waking moment. There’s junk mail, email, SPAM, telemarketers, newspapers, TV shows, field trip forms, homework to check, bills to pay, credit card offers, Facebook notifications, PDFs you can’t read on your Blackberry and ... (sigh). I mean, really!
    The comforting news is that there are plenty of mechanisms in place to protect you from an overabundance of pointless information (thanks, technology!). Warning: it’s going to sound simple.     And, it is.
    While it won’t solve all of your information overload issues, cutting out the following is a great start:

SPAM!
Nothing says productivity like an inbox full of poor grammar, porn and sexually explicit enlargement offers. But if SPAM isn’t your cup of tea, one great solution is to separate your email addresses.
SPAM happens when you do things like shop online or sign up for Internet sweepstakes. The folks who collect your email sell it to some dude pawning Nigerian Royalty scam letters and racy pixxx.
If you don’t want those emails to appear in your Outlook inbox, then don’t use your work email to order stuff. Instead, sign up for a Gmail account. Sure, you can use some other email provider, but Gmail cuts out SPAM like a champ.

Junk Mail
What? You don’t need four more credit cards, life insurance for your gerbil and a bass fishing catalog? That’s weird. But if you don’t want extra cash at 20 percent interest tempting you over and over again, you can stop it at optoutprescreen.com. It’s a free service that lets you opt out of receiving pre-approved credit card and insurance offers.
    When you’re finished there, visit the folks at 41pounds.org. Named for the average amount of junk mail most adults receive in a year, this service promises to “stop 80 to 95 percent of unwanted catalogs and junk mail for you.” While 41pounds’s service isn’t free, they do donate a third of your fee to an organization of your choice. So, not only have you filtered out the unwanted mail, but you’ve saved some trees and donated to charity as well. Look at you!

Do Not Call
Most folks know to add their home phone numbers to the Do Not Call telemarketing registry, but for some reason many neglect to add their cell phone. Go to donotcall.gov and do it now. The Feds recently passed a law that keeps your number from expiring and making its way back onto the calling list (thanks, Congress!).
    Mark Hurst is a productivity geek who wrote a book that changed my life called Bit Literacy, and it’s brilliant. Hurst says, “Bits weigh people down, mentally and emotionally, with incessant calls for attention and engagement.” So true!
    Although Hurst refers to bits of electronic information like email and Word docs, the same mental and emotional weight can be attributed to just about all forms of information — electronic, paper, visual or verbal — that snowballs our way.
    When you cut out the information clutter, you make room for and can better process the stuff that matters. It’s kind of like cleaning out your brain fridge. Take control of the stuff you allow in. You’re busy, but you’re also worth the effort. You deserve better than information-overload-induced stress; you’ve got enough on your plate already. Ladies, start your filters, make room for what matters and go be your best!