As we wind down 2010, I’ve begun assessing what I’ve accomplished and what new challenges I’m going to take on in 2011. The end of a year and the beginning of a new one is always a good time to do some cleaning whether it be reorganizing my office, cleaning out file folders, changing up how I stay organized or anything else to introduce a little shock into the system and prepare for the year ahead.

In addition to keeping our physical and virtual systems and spaces organized, updated and refreshed, every once in a while we need to do some pruning and make tweaks to our sources of information.

I have been seeking out fresh voices in two main ways:

Google Reader – A few days ago I went through all of my feeds, analyzed the stats and unsubscribed from blogs that weren’t providing value to me any more. I then reviewed what blogs my community were often sharing content from and did some searches around specific topics that I want to dive deeper into over the next few months.

Twitter Lists – It’s easy to build your own echo-chamber if you rely on the same Twitter Lists and searches without ever switching things up a bit. To help find new people to connect with I headed over to Listorious and found a few new lists to follow. I then created searches for 3 sets of keywords that I want to monitor in the coming months. Besides the new lists and searches, I went through the lists that I’ve created for myself and did some shuffling around, as well.

I’ve been excited at the new content and people I’m being introduced to over the past week since I did some house cleaning of my RSS feeds, Twitter Lists, and searches. The voices are fresh, new and a welcomed addition to my addiction to the consumption of information.

Are you regularly seeking out fresh voices? If not, use the end of the year as a good excuse to start doing it.

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It’s already a couple weeks into the 2nd half of the year. Can you believe it? The first half of the year blew by so fast. Some days felt like they would never end while other entire weeks flew by before coffee could even be poured. It seems that just a few days ago we were all sitting around making our New Year’s resolutions and setting our goals for the upcoming year.

Earlier today I spent a little while going through the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Overall, I’m pretty happy with where I am with my goals for this year. There were a couple setbacks due to being busy at both New Marketing Labs and Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse. However, I was able to check off some and I made action plans on how to attack a few more to get a couple small victories over the next several weeks. I also scheduled myself a reminder to check in and recalibrate again at the end of 3rd quarter.

Now that we’re fast approaching Fall, have you checked in on those goals that you set? How are you doing with them? Are there any that you can check off? Any that you need to recalibrate?

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Photo Credit: angietorres