The Fix, Part 1: How to Declutter Your Digital Routines
Changing your relationship with technology begins with changing your daily habits. Just as you have a routine for brushing your teeth or making coffee, you can build routines that promote digital wellness. The goal is to create a system that automates good decisions, reducing the need for constant willpower. Here are some powerful tech tips for decluttering your digital routines.
Design a “Focus Mode” for Your Phone
Modern smartphones come with powerful tools designed to help you focus. On an iPhone, this is called “Focus.” On Android, it’s often part of the “Digital Wellbeing” suite. These features allow you to create different profiles for different contexts, like “Work,” “Personal,” or “Sleep.”
For your “Work” focus mode, you could allow notifications only from your boss, your key colleagues, and work-related apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams. All social media, news, and game notifications would be silenced. For a “Personal” mode, you might allow calls and messages from family and close friends while silencing all work-related pings. This puts you in control. Instead of a constant barrage of interruptions, you receive only the information that is relevant to your current context. Spend 30 minutes this week setting up two or three focus modes. It’s one of the highest-leverage actions you can take.
Master the Art of Notification Triage
The default setting for most apps is to send you as many notifications as possible. Your job is to be a ruthless gatekeeper. The guiding principle should be: is this notification for my benefit or the company’s benefit? Most of the time, it’s the latter. Go into your phone’s settings and turn off notifications for every app that isn’t essential for your work or personal safety. Be aggressive. You can always turn them back on if you miss something critical, but you likely won’t.
For the notifications you do keep, consider notification batching. This is the practice of checking and responding to notifications at set times during the day, rather than in real-time. For example, you might check your email at 9 AM, 1 PM, and 4 PM. This prevents you from being constantly pulled out of deep work. You can use your phone’s Do Not Disturb (DND) function—often just called DND—between these batches to create uninterrupted blocks of time for focused work.
Curate a Minimalist Home Screen
Your phone’s home screen is prime real estate for your attention. If it’s cluttered with distracting apps, it will inevitably pull you into mindless scrolling. A digital declutter of your home screen can be transformative. The goal is to make it a calm, tool-based launchpad, not an entertainment hub. Here is a simple, three-step process to redesign it:
* Step 1: The Great App Deletion. Be honest with yourself. Go through every single app on your phone and delete anything you haven’t used in the past three months. Don’t worry—if you truly need it again, you can re-download it in seconds. This single act will dramatically reduce the clutter on your device.
* Step 2: Move Distractions Off the Home Screen. Identify your “infinity pool” apps—the ones with endless scrolling feeds like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or news apps. Move all of them off your primary home screen and into a folder on the second or third page. This adds a small amount of friction. To open the app, you now have to make a conscious effort to swipe and find it, rather than tapping it out of muscle memory.
* Step 3: Organize by Utility. Reserve your home screen for “tools,” not “traps.” These are apps that help you accomplish a specific task and then let you leave, like your camera, notes app, calendar, or maps. Arrange them in a way that makes sense to you. Many people find that a clean, single-page home screen with only their most essential tools provides a profound sense of calm and control every time they unlock their phone.
Use App Timers to Build Awareness
You can’t change what you don’t measure. Most of us vastly underestimate how much time we spend on certain apps. App timers, a feature available in your phone’s Digital Wellbeing or Screen Time settings, allow you to set daily limits for specific applications. For instance, you could set a 30-minute daily limit for Instagram. When you hit that limit, the app will be grayed out for the rest of the day.
This isn’t about punishing yourself. It’s about building awareness and creating a moment of intentionality. When you hit your limit, it forces you to pause and ask, “Is continuing to use this app the best use of my time right now?” Often, the answer is no. Start with generous limits and gradually tighten them as you become more mindful of your usage patterns.
