I've been striving hard to reduce the amount of online "noise" in my life lately. Without setting any quantitative goals, I've been working relentlessly on removing distractions and trying to minimize interruptions. Normally when I wake up I have around 50 messages waiting for me in my inbox. Many of them are automated - comment notifications from WordPress, Google+ messages, Facebook, etc, but they are still things I need to deal with, even if it's just to identify that they belong in the trash. Every email I receive and have to deal with probably notches my background stress level ...