Let me put it this way - have you ever wished someone on Twitter or Facebook would just shut up because he or she keeps flooding your timeline or wall with inane observations, unwanted Farmville invitations, unnecessary Foursquare announcements or endless gushing about their girlfriends and boyfriends? Or do you find your inbox invaded by emails you can't remember subscribing to, or selling goods and services you have no interest in? I'll bet you a beer that you do.

 

I share your pain. While I do rely on social media and email for work, they are also outlets for me to keep in touch with my friends, indulge in my entertainment kicks and learn something useful everyday (like there's a pig in China that walks on two legs). So, having this private space bombarded with information that I don't care about is a waste of my time and bandwidth. I have to sieve out the useless jabber from the information that I really need, all the time!

 

To save my sanity, I do the following to filter my online life:

 

There's an option for you to hide annoying people and applications from your feed. Sadly, I've had to use that on more than one occasion to avoid reading about someone's incessant bitching about work, endless Restaurant City invites and super-mushy proclamations of love that make my hair stand. I've not resorted to deleting people off my list yet, but don't tempt me.

 

Sometimes, you follow someone on Twitter because they seemed interesting or they're famous. But after some time, you realise they're really quite boring or worse, they start to spam your timeline with never-ending re-tweets and Paulo Coelho quotes. Plus, have you noticed how everybody channels Deepak Chopra on Twitter and starts spouting daily nuggets of wisdom like, "Finding the right woman is like finding the right pair of underwear; you know she's the one if she doesn't make your groin itchy." Unfollow them, I say.

 

One reason I love Gmail is because I can filter the mails I get into specific folders. Considering the volume of emails I receive daily, having these folders saves me a lot of time and helps make sure I don't miss out on an important message. They're easy to set up and you can colour-code the labels for better visibility. Google has a list of helpful hints to manage your inbox.

 

I like reading a lot of different content across a wide range of different websites. Obviously, I don't have time to trawl through all of them to see what's new or interesting. That's why I use an RSS feed reader like Google Reader to aggregate content from my favourite sites and read them all from one location. Google Reader allows me to further organise them according to topics or interests and that makes it convenient for me. Lately, I've been using a lot of this service called Feedly that displays my RSS feeds in a magazine-style layout. It's made reading my favourite sites way easier and there are options to share content with my friends across various platforms like Facebook, Twitter and email. I highly recommend it.