I'm also curious to track the evolution of how you handle all the meeting requests. It's hard to say no selectively. I know when I asked Seth Godin for a meeting in what I thought was the most irresistible way possible, he sent me back a kind email that nonetheless said “I don't do meetings.”

I've been doing a bunch of talking at events lately, and this has greatly increased my activity of people wanting to get together. I like your approach of redirecting them to an event instead. Also – for some reason I always felt compelled to meet people in center city, but I ask people to meet me in West Philly now so it's easier for me.

I'm also glad to hear the results of your auto-responder are positive. I've chosen not to unsubscribe b/c it makes me laugh everytime I see it. Two email related things I've done in the past year:

1) Separate my primary project email (Vuzit) from all other projects. This has helped me focus immensely on the project most important to me.

2) Decouple sending email from receiving email. I have to click a “check email” button which really helps reduce incoming distractions when simply trying to clear my inbox. I try not to “check email” unless I'm at Inbox 0, or I've had a processing step that chose to ignore that emails 1, 2, 3, … for whatever reason. The worst thing for me was auto-checking email, especially if you use something that pops up a window on your screen interrupting you.

I have a bunch of books that I want to read, and I think the only way to get this done is if I find an oasis. I'm thinking the coffee shop near my house, and putting it on my calendar to make sure I make it.

Post 10PM is still my prime-time for getting work done, and always has been. I didn't have the “noise” problem when I was in college, but glad I morphed into a night person at that time.

I use Remember the Milk for my TODO list. Anything that is Important to me personally (and not urgent b/c somebody e-mailed it an hour ago) goes into this TODO list. I've gotten in the habit of reviewing this when I'm on a long walk or public transportation to keep perspective. Cost is free unless you want the iphone app so it's $25/year. I also use this for my shopping list, so the iphone app is a must. I think any tool with mobile access would work, so maybe Things is better.

I stopped checking Twitter almost entirely, but I've been meaning to create the private must-read list as well.

Thank again -Chris

As for SMS, email, etc., I'm playing with a few new tools for
aggregating channels.

One of the ideas I've been kicking around recently is a life
dashboard, but obviously, it's a huge and complex problem.

I want to desperately to get out of the cycle of stimulus-response, where we're spending so much of our time being reactive. Imagine if we could start each day with nothing we had to do and only what we're hoping to achieve.

It is such a relief to know that the things you need to remember are recorded somewhere safe and easy to find. That way you can let go of them in your head.

Same with simplify and reducing the channels through which things come in. To have email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments each in their own place seems like something that has the change as all this social technology matures.

My chief concern with information overload is that we spend so much time just reacting to everything, trying to respond and track everything, that there's very little time to actually think and crank out creative work. As soon as I realized how much time I was loosing to my information routine, I've been trying to improve on it, though it's certainly a long slog. Glad to hear things are working well for you!

Oh, and yes – the 12am – 2am period has become my quiet time period, too. As the rest of my day has become busier, I've found this quiet period ending later and later… Have to find the time to think somewhere!

The other thing I do is get everything out of my head and into something I trust. This is part of the GTD methodology. For me, I have two personal filing cabinets, Evernote and Things. Evernote is for content and Things is for what I have to do. I also use Google Docs for things I need to share and have other stuff in an organized file system. Dropbox has made it possible for me to have access to all of the things on my computer that I would need at any time. Do I actually access files from my iPhone through Dropbox that often? No, but it gives me the peace of mind knowing that I can be anywhere and have what I need. This comfort makes it a lot easier to forget and focus on the the task at hand.

I need less noise though, and I've been working to do that and change my work environment and lifestyle to incorporate those changes.