This is another war I am waging, war against advertisements for highly efficient workplace. In this article I am describing why and how I am combating various advertisers from reaching my eye sight. Reduce the noise that reaches you in these 4 simple steps.
We are in media world and we are spammed by advertisements, we see ads every single day 24/7. We see them on billboards on our way to work, on the internet when we surf the web, on television, damn even on our cell phones. Ads, something that you rally need to hate, because they are a huge distraction!
Unfortunately we can’t opt out of all advertisements, but from those that we can, we need to pay really good attention. You need to have certain mentalities when it comes down to your personal information and who has it. You don’t want third party spamdvertisers to own your email, home address and cell phone number.
This is huge! Your personal information stays with you! Period. You don’t want any of those advertisers spamming your inbox, any kind of inbox, be it sms, email or even your home address. Do not give out your email.
I know certain people are hooked up to new promotion services like Groupon and similar websites, but even in that case I highly recommend separate email address, for advertisement purposes only. Be very careful to whom you give your personal information. I am in online business for quite a while, there are whole databases of emails, being sold on the “black market”. These so called lists consist of numerous people who gave away their emails to shady characters. You do not want your email to be on those lists!
You might wonder why am I so hateful towards email marketing. It’s really really simple thing, you do not want anything to get in the way between you and your goals. And if you are checking your email, it shouldn’t end up on checking that new fancy deal that just popped out on Groupon. As email isn’t distracting enough!
Each spam or advertisement mail that you’ve opted in, requires your mental power to process it, even when you don’t read it. It’s cluttering your communication channel.
Same goes for your Facebook, do not like every single Fanpage out there, simply because you like something. Try to figure out weather the content of the webpage is actually useful to you, before you like it. I don’t follow brands at all on Facebook, but on the other hand I am massive liker of numerous useful blogs.
Also be aware of numerous Facebook applications that can send you email. Yea maybe it’s fun to see your “like-ness” and “compatibility levels” with your friends, but it’s not nice to receive spam in one of your main online communication channels.
DO NOT GIVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO COMPANIES! I am really mindful of these things and I fiercely guard my privacy from these kinds of aggressors. We used to get a lot of spam cold calls on our landlines in our neighborhood and it was one of the biggest distraction factors. It was rude and distracting, no matter how polite they were.
And the last tip, probably the most important one is to install AdBlock extension for browsers. Yea, some websites might live from advertisements but I simply refuse to give in. My time is extremely valuable, and once you instal AdBlocker, you will see how internet is calm place without too much noise actually. If you are using Chrome, you can find the Adblock for Chrome here. In literally 2 clicks you will remove 99% of ads from websites. No excuses, get on it.
This concludes the simple tips for decluttering your environment from advertisements. What are the worse forms of spam and advertisements that bombard your daily lives? How do you cope with them?
