Did you enjoy a few days offline, spent some quality time with family and friends and are now staring at a full email inbox? Why not just spend half an hour on re-organizing all your subscriptions and notifications, deleting apps and accounts before starting into the new year with all the baggage from last year.

Here are a few easy things to do that can save you lots of time in the new year.

Newsletters and email notifications

How many newsletters do you really read and which ones are deleted most of the time. Resubscribing is so easy, be bold and click unsubscribe.

Mailchimp is likely used for many of the newsletters you get and per default an archive page can be bookmarked to keep an eye on the newsletter. Instead of scrolling through your inbox you can browse to the archive page and read a newsletter when you have actually got the time.

What about all those auto generated emails? You got a new follower on Twitter, a new like on Facebook? Wow, but that information could wait until you log in next time. Each email means at least a few seconds of distraction.

Delete unused apps

If you haven’t used an app for over a year delete it right away. Both iOS and Android allow you to sort apps by install date or last date used. On iOS there seems to be a way to actually show the last time an app was used. Action 3 Launcher on Android allows you to sort apps by Install time.

Website & Blog

Remember the tool you discovered last year which generated fancy reports by just adding a little tracking script to your site? Or the gallery plugin you installed on your site but only used once? Plugins, Tracking Scripts, unused themes and other gimmicks cause additional loading time or need updates, why not check your list of WordPress Plugins, analytics tools and disconnect or uninstall.

Domains and Hosting

The start of the new year is often taken as a chance to start new projects (fitness center anyone?). What about the domains you reserved and hosting accounts you signed up for? Why leave them any longer on auto-renew. Log in to your hosters control panel and take a quick look at the domains you reserved a while ago but never communicated anyway.

Check connections to your social media and Google Analytics account

Over a year you potentially tried out a lot of tools and apps that connect to your Facebook or Twitter account. Facebook, Twitter, Google allow you to see a list of connected services and allow easy removal of access.

Unshare folders on your cloud drive

Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. allow easy sharing of your data. Take a look at the list of shared folders and see if sharing the folders is still necessary.

Uninstall browser extensions

Browser extensions could be little spy engines, so you should do this on a monthly base, not yearly. Only keep browser extensions running you use often and which are published by trusted entities. You might wanna check out our post on recommended browser extensions for digital marketers.

Leave Group chats on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack etc.

Remember the group chat you opened for the project you worked on with 5 partners in Slack, or the vacation planning group in WhatsApp? The unfocused chatter often continues for months, generates notifications again and again and is distracting most of the time. Look for the leave Group or leave channel button, it is so easy…

Your To Do app

Take a look at your To Do list. Do you really want to start the year by again giving to dos from summer 2016 new deadline dates? Be bold and delete them all, the most important ones will be remembered. If you do not want to delete them push the undone tasks in an idea list, if that is more fitting.

Delete all in your Inbox

This one is the hardest: Select all emails in your inbox and click delete! I know this sounds horrifying, but the emails are not gone, they are moved to the trash folder first (don’t worry you will remember the important ones)

Ready? Let’s get to work!

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