Clearing Technological Clutter with Better Habits and Apps like Unroll Me

We are constantly being bombarded by distractions. Sometimes even the things that are supposed to be keeping up productive, like our personal technology devices, only create more barriers to efficiency. So how do you stay focused in a world that seems to constantly give you reasons to divert your attention elsewhere? Thankfully, there are several things you can do right now that can keep you on track and get rid of the technological clutter around you.

The first step to improving your efficiency is to delete the apps that you don’t need. We all have apps lingering on our phone that we don’t look at anymore, whether that be because they’re related to some fad we tried and ditched or they were used to prepare for an event that’s already passed. Cleaning up all of the needless programs from your phone and computer will narrow your mind down to only looking at the ones that will benefit you. Not to say that you can’t keep the one or two fun apps that you actually do use regularly, like the game that you play every morning on your transit to work, but just make sure there are no more long-untouched apps still gathering dust.

In a similar sense, disable comments and likes on your social media posts if you can. We often obsess over watching the statistics of our social media, and before you know it this can consume hours of your time a week. Disabling comments and likes will decrease the amount of notifications you get on those apps, making you check it less often. Another way to limit the number of notifications you get would be to disable the location settings on your phone. This will stop letting companies know what sales are nearby, thereby silencing some of those pesky local advertisements.

Our inboxes are filled with junk, spam, and subscription emails that we sometimes take up much of our day sorting through. Services like Unroll.me save time and effort by managing your emails for you. Unroll.me is a free management service that consolidates your email subscriptions, so they won’t fill up your inbox. You can implement it with your Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or AOL email account by signing up on their website and linking your email, which automatically lets Unroll.me scan your inbox for what regular subscriptions you receive.

After the scan is finished, Unroll.me shows you your Rollup, which is a digest that lists the email subscriptions you are being sent on a regular basis. Then you can control which emails you want to add or remove from the Rollup, as well as whether you want it to send you monthly notifications of new subscriptions. You can also choose to completely unsubscribe from the subscriptions on the list that you don’t want using the edit function. It’s a quick and simple way to streamline your emails and not feel like you’re drowning in the chaos of an untamed inbox.

It’s hard to block out the world around you to get work done but making a concerted effort to change even small technological habits can greatly improve your productivity. As long as we understand how to adjust the use of devices to our advantage, we can still be efficient and plugged in at the same time.