How to declutter your digital world

Working remotely may have eliminated your commute and allowed you to spend the day in your pajamas, but it also means you’re most likely bombarded with digital communication every second of the day — from personal and professional emails crowding your inboxes to push notifications reminding you of every news development to the nonstop viral allure of Twitter and Instagram.

If you are suffering from tech fatigue, or simply trying to become more productive online, here are steps you can take to organize your digital landscape.

Create separation: Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who writes about the intersection of technology and culture, said many people succumb to what he calls the list/ reactive method: They instantly react to communication — texts, emails, Slack messages — while occasionally trying to make progress on their work. One moment they’re responding to an email from their child’s teacher, the next they’re jumping on a conference call — blurring the line between the professional and personal.

“It blends together the lives completely,” Newport said. “You’re never not working. You always feel behind.”

To avoid that cycle, set a fixed digital schedule that clearly dictates when you are working, when you are attending to your family and when you are unwinding. Deal with communications concerning the different parts of your life only during those times. Put aside blocks of time to check personal text messages. And only go over the day’s headlines in the morning so you don’t casually check the news during work hours.

Set expectations: Talk to your colleagues — or, if you’re a teacher, your students — about when you are available to answer them.

“Set expectations for everyone involved,” said Lynette O’Keefe, the director of research and innovation at the Online Learning Consortium, a nonprofit that offers digital teaching guidance to educators.

That can help reduce the volume of messages you receive and make clear to people that your schedule may not align with theirs. Educators, for instance, should let their students know whether they respond to emails after hours or not.

Assume control of your inbox: One of the simplest ways to clear out your inbox is to unsubscribe from mailing lists. Both Gmail and Apple’s Mail app notify users if an email is from a mailing list with the option to unsubscribe with a single click. Use it.

You can also sort — and limit — emails by filtering them by the sender, recipient or subject line. For your personal inbox, consider creating labels for bills or appointment reminders, so they don’t get

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Then, consider whether you would be more productive if you consolidated your personal and professional emails in one inbox. If you worry about missing important notes from either and constantly toggle between the two, import them under a single address. You can do this on Gmail using the mail fetcher option, or on Outlook by creating aliases that send and receive emails from different accounts. Both systems also have features that can automatically

forward all your emails from one account to another.

If you collaborate with a large team and feel that long email threads often get in the way of the task at hand, brainstorm an efficient workflow. Maybe that means dropping ideas into a shared Google doc or holding weekly meetings to go over specific goals.

To avoid wasting time emailing back and forth to schedule meetings, use a shared calendar — such as YouCanBookMe, Calendly or x. ia — where colleagues can see your availability and book slots accordingly. If you frequently set up meetings with people outside your organization, those tools can be integrated with Google and Outlook calendars, so you don’t have to switch between different platforms.

Another timesaver: Rather than type up the same response to common questions or requests, save a template so you can quickly fire it off when needed. That, O’Keefe said, tells recipients, “I see you, I hear you, I’m interested in responding to you — but here’s when it will happen.”

Finally, you will never become an inbox zero person if you treat your email like a todo list. Instead, use online tools such as Trello, Flow- e or Asana to create task boards that organize your responsibilities according to urgency and progress. If those aren’t for you, Gmail has a task feature embedded in the calendar app that lets you create digital to- do lists, while Outlook has a similar feature called To Do. ( Its classic task tool is being phased out.)

“The key thing here is low friction,” Newport said. “Get things written down out of your head.”