By Leo Babauta

Our lives are filled with so many inputs, it can all just feel like noise — emails, messages, tasks, meetings, news, social media and more. We get overwhelmed, and often shut down or avoid.

Too many priorities, too much information, too many inputs, too much noise.

The secret is to find the signal in all this noise.

The noise is everything that feels urgent, or all the incoming stuff. It can make us reactive when we’re acting on the noise.

The signal is the stuff that actually matters. It’s the stuff that will move the needle, make the impact you want, move the important things forward in a meaningful way.

We need to get good at distinguishing this if we want to deal with overwhelm, and be less reactive.

So how do we distinguish the signal from the noise?

Let’s take a look.

Criteria for Finding the Signal

There’s no right answer here, but here are some ways I look for signal in all of the noise …

  1. What would move forward my most important things?
  2. What would I regret ignoring?
  3. What keeps surfacing when I get quiet?

And this last one is what I highly recommend — practicing a little stillness every day. It can be daily meditation, but it could also be just pausing for a minute or two, closing your eyes, breathing in slowly, and relaxing. Listening.

In this kind of stillness and quiet, the signal becomes clearer.

How to Practice

Question 1 above (moving forward your most important things) requires you to know what’s most important. So I recommend a little stillness every few months, for an hour or two, to get clear on your priorities. They might shift over the course of a year, so check back in every 3 months or so.

Then do a weekly “signal check”: 10 minutes at the start of the week to ask what’s really important for this week. Write those down, schedule them if you can.

I highly recommend doing a daily stillness practice, either at the start of the day or at the end (or both!) to keep the signal visible. What’s important for today, in all the noise?

And during the course of the day, if you’re overwhelmed or feeling reactive … just take a moment to calm yourself, re-center, and get clear on your signal with just a moment of stillness.

Clarity isn’t found in more information — it’s found in letting ourselves relax into stillness, and finding the signal of what really matters.