I haven’t gone this hardcore ever, but when I was working on freelance stuff I started turning off my Twitter client which I think helps a lot. A while ago I set my RSS reader to manual reload only which helped a great deal because I could never resist the little red number of unread articles that showed up in my dock. Then I started using Twitter and my client has a little pop up that shows up on the top right of my corner whenever there’s something new.
I only follow a little more than 70 feeds, but that’s enough that it goes off every few minutes. To the people out there who follow more, HOW DO YOU DO IT??? It would drive me crazy for it to just go constantly. Or maybe they treat it like my RSS reader and only load it manually.
I turn off the growl notifications in the upper right. The little blue bird can be distracting for me sometimes, but I can handle that. The growl notifications are insufferable.
I follow 90.
Yeah, probably time for me to turn those notifications off too. Weird thing is I have growl on for IMs so sometimes I don’t realize where it’s coming from at first