Published: Wed 11 February 2026
By Fred
In Blog .
tags: Technology
Introduction
I started this in the summer of 2025 when I realized that my interactions with technology were stressing me out. I was sitting on a bench, idly holding a book in my hands and talking to an old friend and mentor whos children are about half a decade older than mine. We were commiserating about our individual relationships with our phones and computers and I realized that I could take matters into my own hands. What follows are my real recommendations that I myself have followed to make my life less stressful and more efficient.
Electronics
Phone
Start by going through all the pop-up notifications that appear on your phone each day. Identify any that aren't providing you with useful information (e.g. game notifications designed to get you playing again, weather updates, shopping offers) and revoke the ability for those applications to send you messages.
Next organize your start screen by grouping apps into folders so that there's only one screen of icons. You're going to notice that there are a bunch of apps you don't use so go ahead and delete those. It's OK, you can always download them again later.
Once you can see all your apps icons (or at least the folders containing them) on one screen, it's time to take a look at the badges. Make a list of any applications that are putting badges on your screen but aren't providing you actionable information. Again games that are trying to suck you back in are perfect for this. Remove their ability to put a badge on screen and move on to the biggest step: you can admit it... you're not going to go back to all those unread emails so there's no reason to keep them unread. Mark your entire inbox as "read" and move on. Now we're at the point where you need to take a break because it's time to let these changes cook.
Email
Go do something else for a day and as email comes in I want you to either read it, unsubscribe from it, or mark it as spam. Do this until you've got your inbox under control. Your goal should be to go to put down your phone at the end of the day without having any unread emails, and the only way to do that is by having so little incoming email that reading it stops being a chore and starts being a treat. That usually starts kicking in around 10-20 messages per day, for example today I received 16 messages to my inbox and unsubscribed from 1 mailing list that I stopped appreciating.
Computer
There are three main parts of your strategy here: deleting unneeded applications, disabling unneeded notifications, and disabling auto-start programs that aren't needed. It's probably easiest to start with autostart programs. If you see something that you don't recognize you can probably safely turn it off. Go through the same steps for your computer notifications that you did for your incoming email.