Different Ways to Keep Up with Your Digital Life

As life accelerates with ever greater access to information and the crushing demand on our time, it becomes more important than ever to keep up.

Finding new ways to manage messages, emails, task lists and other facets of our modern digital lives is important to parse through the information to find the hidden gems that are genuinely useful. Here are a few things you can do to help manage your digital life better.

Upgrading to a Better Smartphone

If you’re stuck back on an older version of the iPhone where the speed of the phone has been intentionally slowed to prevent complete battery failure, it’s probably time to upgrade. The performance is likely to be impaired and not every modern iOS app will run efficiently. For Android, modern apps require at least Android 5.0 to run, in most cases, and a minimum requirement of Android 6.0 is coming soon.

You should look at gadgetgestures.com for some ideas about what smartphone to upgrade to. If the sticker shock of the latest iPhone X left you reeling, then you may wish to consider switching to Android. It’s robust, fast, and due to the competition from different brands, the devices don’t have to cost the earth either. This leaves you money left over for an e-reader or a tablet.

Task Management 101

Managing a task list has become a problem for many people. They have multiple projects and sub-tasks. It gets difficult to find the time just to enter all the tasks into the app, let alone keep up with them. One of the better apps is Wunderlist, which was purchased by Microsoft not too long ago. They are using much of the excellent technology to redesign their Microsoft To Do app with similar features, but Wunderlist happily continues being developed separately for its legion of fans.

Inbox Zero

The idea of clearing your inbox on a regular basis isn’t new, but if you’re having difficulties keeping up with the amount of email flowing into your inbox, you need Inbox Zero. The idea behind it is to get your inbox back to empty status in record time, so every day ends with a clean slate.

Another approach to email is to create a folder named “Backlog” and move every outstanding email from a day or older over to that folder. Then clear the day’s email to get your email inbox to empty status. Once you’ve done that, assign time every morning to:

• Clear your new email
• Go through several days’ worth of emails in your Backlog folder

By using the backlog and today’s email approach – suggested by author Mark Forster – it avoids staying overwhelmed and creates a structured way to clear the backlog over time.

Surviving the digital life is about creating new procedures for how to deal with the volume of contact that you receive daily. Sometimes you must unsubscribe to some communications because you simply don’t have time to read them. Other times, it’s necessary to shorten replies to speed up email processing time. Either way, changing how you manage your daily life and using advanced tools to help you is the way to go.