Matt Wood, over at 43 folders, wrote an article entitled, Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments.

I just finished reading the article and he makes several interesting points.  Earlier this year I suffered massive burn out from work, blogging, online reading, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace,  and even my radio show.  I replaced my job with a better one.  But it caused me to burn out faster on the rest of my online activities and even my radio show started to become routine.

The end result was I ended up stopping the regular updates on my blog, cut MySpace mainly out of my life, and even stopped Twittering (even though at the time I wasn’t doing it that much).  Derek (the host of the radio show) and I even started making changes to the format of our radio show and even added a new co-host.  Things have been looking up recently in the way of my online world.

But I still found the Matt’s article enlightening.  So much that I will be closing my MySpace account, disconnecting from all IMs except AOL, Google Talk, and MSN (eventually I want to end up with just Google Talk and MSN because I use MSN for work), and even changing the format of my blog to be more commentary rather than lessons.  I have too much stuff that I do online and I need to cut back.  I also need to trim out my RSS feeds to just those that I read regularly.

Google Reader makes it easy to trim the reading fat by using it’s Trends page.  It allows you to see what you read the most and what sites have not updated in a while.  Those two pieces of information alone will help me trim about 20-30 RSS feeds out of my subscriptions just by themselves.

Another thing that might possibly help in some areas (like Twitter & Jaiku) is finding a way to update one with the other.  I already do this on Facebook where my Twitter status updates my Facebook status.  This is done with a Twitter Facebook application.  Maybe if I can get something that will update Facebook & Jaiku from my Twitter account, it would reduce the amount of typing and websites I need to visit.  The main reason for this is that I like Jaiku better than I like Twitter, but no one I know is on Jaiku at the moment because it is invite only.

A part of me wonders what would happen if I cut my life down to just the following online sites:

Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,  & Power of Information.

The thing is, yes, I have a Del.icio.us account, but it is more for marking things for later reading from Viigo (BlackBerry RSS reader) and for friends to send me stuff to read when I’m not online.  I have several IM accounts:  At home I only use Google Talk while at work I use Google Talk, AIM, and MSN.  Once Google gets the AIM integration working on the Google Talk client, I’ll stop connecting to AIM via anything else and only use Google Talk and MSN for work.  I already only have 2 email accounts that I primarily use (Gmail & work).  All my other email accounts filter through Gmail so I am not checking multiple accounts.

So how much more can i really cut down my online existence?  I could cut out Facebook and only use LinkedIn, or should I reverse that?  As you can tell, there are several decisions that need to be made when cutting out websites to connect to and accounts to keep active.  How do you plan on doing this yourself?  How would you go about it?  How did you do it, if you have already done it?  If you have answers to these questions, please leave a comment, I’d be interested in hearing about it.