A new year tech do-over

Anew year means a fresh start for some people and it’s also a good approach to take with your tech life. Each year is spent saving stories to read, following people on social media, taking hundreds of photos and ignoring your inbox.

Here are some tips to refresh your digital life by getting rid of the clutter you’ve built up over the past year.

Emails: A bloated inbox can cause digital anxiety and keeping it under control is easy, but you have to be ruthless.

If you’re brave, highlight every email in your inbox and click ‘‘Archive’’. You’ll now have a zero inbox and all your emails will be searchable.

If you’re more the timid type, put your emails into a folder called 2017 so you can get them later if needed.

Another tip is to go through and unsubscribe from emails from brands or anyone who is sending you unwanted emails.

Remove saved stories: Pocket is one of my favourite apps. It lets you save stories from any website to read later. The only problem is that it can get full quickly. I recommended a quick browse through the list and save the five you really want and delete the rest.

Many news websites have a similar feature so repeat the process there too.

Social media: Social media sites are designed to be addictive. If you value your time, then you need to reduce the number of people and companies you follow. Once again, be ruthless. Limit who you follow to those who inspire or inform you. Everyone else is just adding to the noise.

Photos: This is the hardest one of all so be prepared to spend a bit of time here. No-one wants to lose precious photos but if you’re not organised you’ll never be able to find the best ones to appreciate or share later.

Start by deleting anything blurry or boring. Also, delete double-ups – you don’t need 10 images of the same sunset. Also, don’t forget to back them up and consider using a cloud-based service such as Google Photos.

Apps: Everyone has dozens of apps on their phones but most only use the same few each day.

Use the new year to give your phone an app refresh by deleting unused apps (you can always download them again) and organising them.

I have three apps screens. My 16 most used on the first, 12 regularly used apps on the second screen and the third screen is used for folders for rarely used ones.

The fewer apps and other digital clutter you have in your life means you can dedicate more time to achieving your new year resolutions.