{"id":134,"date":"2006-01-23T15:43:05","date_gmt":"2006-01-23T22:43:05","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-01-23T16:18:46","modified_gmt":"2006-01-23T16:18:46","slug":"noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2006\/noise\/","title":{"rendered":"Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"juiz-outdated-message jodpm-top\">Heads up, this content is 20 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/media\/static.jpg\" width=\"200\" border=\"1\" alt=\"\" align=\"right\" vspace=\"10\" hspace=\"10\" \/>I have 10 browser windows open (including tabs&#8230; thank you Firefox), iTunes playing a variety of songs, a handful of other programs open mid-project, my inbox boasting a number of unanswered emails, papers strewn across my desk, my new pride-and-joy large whiteboard displaying several color-coded things-to-do lists next to a half-finished brainstorm, and a spiral bound notebook boasting a brain-purge list of everything on my mind that I haven&#8217;t yet taken care of.And I&#8217;m staring blankly at a wall.When the noise around me starts to resemble the static of a missing television station, I realize I&#8217;m no longer acting. I&#8217;m reacting.  And not very effectively at that.  I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m alone in this experience.  It&#8217;s the multitasker&#8217;s reality, the self-employed professional&#8217;s life, the modern American situation.  We live at the levels we expect to live at.  We expect certain levels of noise, procrastination, and disatisfaction.  There&#8217;s a threshold of pain we don&#8217;t allow ourselves to go beyond, and there&#8217;s a threshold of peace we don&#8217;t allow ourselves to enter.  We know our limits, we chock them up to reality, and we stay within them.It takes a lot of work to change those limits.  Right now, I&#8217;m exploring the options for reducing the noise in my life, and battling myself in internal debates.  Half of me is struggling to be more aware and make decisions to simplify the distracting stimuli around me, while the other half of me is fighting tooth and nail to maintain those comfortable levels of noise.  I reduce one thing, another one pops up.  I spend an hour examining my patterns, and then follow it with two hours zoning out on autopilot.  Breaking habits is a process of negotiation.You can either jump into the cold water from the cliff and risk a heart attack and paralysis, or you can ease yourself in and take all day.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heads up, this content is 20 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.I have 10 browser windows open (including tabs&#8230; thank you Firefox), iTunes playing a variety of songs, a handful of other programs open mid-project, my inbox boasting a number of unanswered emails, papers strewn across my desk, my new pride-and-joy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}