Small and Easy Digital Habits That Can Save You Hours a Month

Did you know that checking a single “urgent” work message can break your focus for more than 20 minutes? In fact, you can lose hours every month to a dozen tiny, unnoticed digital leaks that happen every day. By setting up a few strict digital guardrails, you can win back that time.

Manage Your Emails

We work with dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of emails every day. If we don’t organize them properly, our inboxes can quickly turn into an overflowing waste bin. Messages become difficult to find, and sorting through the clutter gets frustrating.

Fortunately, keeping your inbox under control isn’t complicated. Here are a few tips to help you stay organized and manage the flow more efficiently:

1. Choose an email client that allows you to customize sorting rules. Most modern email platforms sort messages automatically, which is already convenient. But some also allow you to decide exactly how your emails are organized and assigned to different categories. It’s much easier to find an invoice when it’s in an Invoices folder rather than buried in your inbox.
2. Disable notifications. Turn off notifications to avoid distractions every time you receive an email. There are already plenty of things vying for your attention. Removing at least one of them will definitely help.
3. Enable exceptions. Add important contacts or messages to a whitelist so you don’t miss anything urgent. The exact setup depends on your email client. Some platforms allow you to enable notifications for high-priority emails; others let you receive alerts only from selected senders.

Pro Tip: You can disable notifications in most apps while allowing alerts from important contacts.

4. Set times to check your email. Disabling notifications won’t help much if you still check your inbox every two minutes. To avoid this, set specific times during the day to respond to messages. The number and length of these sessions will vary from person to person, but for many people, two or three 30-minute sessions a day may be enough.

Block Websites and Apps (for a While)

Website and app blockers do more than just stop notifications from popping up. They prevent you from accessing time-wasting websites and apps. This is especially helpful when you’re caught in a doomscroll loop and need to give a task your full attention.

Here’s how it works: you install an app or browser extension, add distracting sites and apps to the blocklist, and set a schedule for your focus sessions. Once a session starts, the blocker won’t let you open anything on your blocklist.

Some blockers can be tricked by changing your device’s clock. Others are stricter, so you can’t get around the restrictions or remove the blocker until the session is over.

Stop Recreating Files

Recreating information is another time-consuming habit. Retyping text from screenshots or scanned documents can easily take hours, but it’s absolutely unnecessary.

Instead, get into the habit of converting files. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can extract text from images and make documents editable in seconds. And you don’t even need to understand how OCR works, as it’s already integrated into many online tools and services.

Add this image-to-Word converter to your bookmarks so you can easily find it the next time you need it.

Pro Tip: File conversion works both ways. If you need to share a document as an image for a presentation or social media post, you can convert Word to JPG instead of taking screenshots.

Communicate Asynchronously

If you’ve customized email sorting, disabled notifications, and turned on app blockers but still spend too much time on online communication, the problem may not be the tools themselves, but how you use them.

While occasionally switching between conversations and tasks is normal, doing it too often throughout the day can become stressful. One study found that after an interruption, office workers took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the task they were originally working on. And it wasn’t because refocusing was difficult—it took only a few seconds. However, even a brief interruption can lead to another task, then another, before a person finally returns to the original work.

Of course, it’s impossible to postpone an urgent task for long. But it’s also important to remember that online communication is asynchronous, meaning you shouldn’t drop what you’re doing whenever you receive a message. If you can tackle the task in the near future, it may be better to finish it first and reply to your messages later.

Pro Tip: Getting used to asynchronous communication can feel uncomfortable, especially at first. To make it easier, think of it like working across time zones. You don’t expect an immediate response every time you send a message, and other people don’t expect one from you.

Digital Detox

Taking a break from digital activities can actually save you time when you return to them.

In the morning, try not to check your phone as soon as you wake up. Also, try to avoid reaching for your tablet while having breakfast.

The weekend is also a great opportunity to step away from screens and spend time on other activities.

When you eventually return to your digital routine, you’ll feel more focused and refreshed, making it easier to stay productive and avoid procrastination.