Lifehacker just came off a massive “spring cleaning” week, and among the posts that really caught my eye is this set of tips on how to declutter your digital life and trim down on the number of things that demand your attention or distract you from the things you really should be doing. There’s a certain tipping point where the things you have to do to “stay on top of things” when it comes to your feeds, blogs, and digital tasks becomes more of a chore than something fun to do, and Lifehacker has a series of tips on how to make it more manageable and make your digital life fun again instead of a second job. Among them? This gem:

Compact and Manage Social Network Alerts

Facebook has a way of making you sorry you use it, at least if you regard your inbox as something more than just a junk pile. To trim down on the messages that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, and other services send you, we’ve suggested a two-part filtering and management scheme for social networks. The short version: use Nutshell Mail and a good RSS reader. Facebook has made email management a bit more convenient itself, offering in-email replies to comment mail, which we took as an opportunity to show off our Facebook-taming Gmail filter.

I’ve omitted some of the delicious links that are actually over at the Lifehacker post in question because I want you to go over and actually read it. I’m completely like this though; sometimes it’s easy to trim down your social networks and other times it’s difficult, and for those times when it’s tough it can be really helpful to know how to minimize the amount of distraction from your social Web services and from the other services that you actively enjoy.

[ Lifehacker :: Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, 2010 Edition ]