The I.T. Guy:

This is why you should completely wipe your smartphone.

ONCE EVERY few months, I take my iPhone and go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘General’ -> ‘Reset’ -> ‘Erase All Content and Settings’. I skip the offer to use a backup, or transfer data, and build from the factory settings. My friends think I’m masochistic. But hear me out.

Clearing out old apps or files, even if it’s just to re-download them, will help almost any device. But deleting is tedious. The trick is to do it all at once, with one clean wipe.

Your vital stuff will still be there. Modern cloud systems, as long as you have your password, will keep the stuff most of us really care about – your SIM card is your phone number, and as long as you have iCloud or Google Photos, copies of your photos and videos are safely stashed in a data centre.

Sure, the performance benefits might not be obvious. So if your phone’s fine, why bother? Because you create an opportunity to resist the temptation of tech maximalism. If your day has ever felt overloaded with dings and scrolling, a clean phone helps you distinguish what’s useful from what’s just novel. I start by turning off almost all notifications. I try to go at least a week without downloading Instagram or

Reddit. And last round, I fully broke up with those languagelearning apps, the software equivalent of the jeans I refuse to donate because, someday,

I’ll lose that weight and wear them again. Just focus on stuff that’s really useful, right now.

Years of testing consumer tech has made me appreciate this one Seinfeld scene. Jerry and George are trying to write a script. After discussing pen choice, Jerry halts further attempts at procrastination: ‘It may seem outwardly that the pen and the paper and the chair play a large role. But they’re all somewhat incidental to the actual using of the brain.’ For anyone whose phone, like mine, distracts you from the actual using of the brain, hopefully this approach will help you turn that device back into what it is: a tool.