I help busy people organize their digital clutter. Here are 5 features you should start using on your phone and laptop immediately.
I was trained by Marie Kondo to help people declutter their homes. The results with my clients were dramatic, but there was always an elephant in the room: their digital clutter.
So two years ago, I pivoted my business to focus exclusively on digital clutter. Now, high-achieving women reach out because they share a dirty little secret: their digital lives are in chaos.
Their email inboxes are out of control. They grimace when I see their desktop. They're resetting passwords daily. And don't even get them started on their photo library.
As a tech and productivity coach, I work with them to clear out digital chaos and turn everyday tech into personal assistants.
Here are five game-changing hidden features I teach them:
Gmail's Priority Inbox feature can help you organize your emails
Gmail has a powerful, little-known feature called Priority Inbox, which divides your email into four clear sections: Important and Unread, Starred, Action Needed, and Everything Else.
Use Gmail's important flags to train it on what's important and what isn't. Now, your most important emails will always rise to the top, while promotional emails sink to the bottom, making it much easier to unsubscribe and delete.
My clients' favorite part? Adding colors and emojis to their newly organized inbox. Checking email begins to feel, dare I say … joyful?
Your bookmarks bar can help you organize your tabs
Gone are the days when we need to keep 67 tabs open because we're afraid of losing something. With a drag-and-drop, your active projects and most frequently visited sites can be at your fingertips.
The trick: bookmark folders. Create folders on your browser's bookmark bar for things like: Italy Trip, Budget Proposal, Summer Camp, and put all of the relevant sites into that folder.
Pro tip: Maximize precious bookmark bar real estate by deleting the text in the name of the bookmark and leaving just the logo.
Siri and ChatGPT can be effective personal assistants
I boss Siri around all day like she's my personal assistant, because she is. "Siri, remind me to take the chicken out to defrost when I get home. Siri, what's the weather going to be today? Siri, text Dad that I'm on my way."
My other assistant? ChatGPT. Ask it things like "Help me plan a weekend in the Lower East Side with two toddlers. I'd like a hotel with a pool and free breakfast that's near a playground. Please provide recommendations for family-friendly restaurants." You will be amazed.
Use Apple's Groceries list feature and share it with others
Apple's little-known Groceries list feature takes the mental load out of grocery shopping.
Go to the Reminders app and create a list. For List Type, choose Groceries. Now, when you say "Siri, add apples to the Grocery List," it will magically put apples on the list and auto-categorize them!
Share the list with everyone who does the shopping, and be surprised and elated when they come home with something you took five seconds to add to the list a week ago.
Try an app to declutter your photos
Your phone has a few built-in tools for decluttering photos, but they're lackluster at best. To supercharge your photo organizing, try the CleanerKit app. It will scan your photo library and then suggest what to clear out, including blurry photos, landscapes, and even similar photos.
Plus, the Cleaner Kit allows you to declutter month by month, eliminating the overwhelm that keeps most of us stuck staring down 18,000 photos at once.
It's time to take advantage of all that our tech has to offer, and these five tips are the perfect place to start.
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44 minutes ago
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Atif Riaz: I have learned to reframe digital and security initiatives in terms of exploration, production, or operational success. Once you link IT to business goals, alignment and funding follows. Randy Volkin: Reputation matters a lot at Perry Homes. But we also know there's no such thing as zero risk. Even the federal government gets breached. So we talk about making good, measured decisions rather than chasing everything shiny. You need to take calculated risks to progress any business but we won't make compromises with customer data or other matters that impact our reputation. Viet Dang: Our CEO is very much in tune with emerging technology and its adoption. He recognized the value of AI early on and established—and now chairs—our internal AI Governance Committee. We're focused on organization-wide implementation, encouraging our team to explore the best uses of AI, develop effective prompts, and understand how these tools can support their work. 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iOS 26 has 5 killer upgrades I can't wait to use — but only these iPhones will get them
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New York Times
4 hours ago
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Your Phone Is Stolen. Your Laptop Gets Lost. Here's What to Do.
Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter By Dave Gershgorn Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. Updated June 26, 2025 On a humid August night in Ferguson, Missouri, about 10 years ago, my phone was stolen. I was working as a photojournalist covering the protests against Michael Brown's killing, and amidst the bustle of the packed street, my phone was snatched out of my lap. I chased after the thief, but as we made a turn off the boulevard, and the streetlights grew sparse, I gave up. My phone was gone. That had never happened to me before, and I felt completely lost. I was far from my home in New York, I had no way to communicate with my family and friends and no way to get up-to-date information about what was happening around me, and I didn't have my saved travel plans or airline ticket home — or even any music. And suddenly all of that information was in someone else's hands. After I returned home, I bought a new phone and set it up from scratch. I still had my photos and contact data saved in Apple's iCloud, but to this day, I don't know everything I might have lost. A decade later, it's much easier to recover a phone — and all the personal information on it. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each built location-tracking services, which allow you to track your device's last known location on a map in real time. Google added an AI-powered feature to Android phones that is designed to detect when your device has been snatched and locks the phone screen to make it harder for a thief to access your data. Although these tools give you options if your device is stolen, they don't ensure that your data is completely protected. Dave Lewis, global chief information security officer at identity security company 1Password, told Wirecutter that the average criminal might not be able to circumvent facial recognition or a fingerprint reader and will most likely flip the device to someone else for parts. 'But for an attacker with any sort of technical savvy, if they have physical access to the device, it's game over,' Lewis said. Today, I would do things differently, taking a few steps before my device is stolen as well as after. This is what I'd do. Explore all articles 1. Enable your device's Find My device-tracking tool. Finding your phone is easier if you have its Find My location-tracking feature enabled. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have versions of this tool, which allows you to locate your device on a map, display a message on its lock screen, or play a sound on it remotely so that you can try to find it if it's nearby. We also recommend turning on a feature in iOS called Stolen Device Protection, which requires the person unlocking your phone to verify their identity with Face ID or Touch ID, wait an hour, and then verify again before being able to change sensitive information such as account passwords. Google has made a similar feature, called Identity Check, available for some Android phones. 2. Set your device to automatically create backups. Unless the phone's data is backed up, security experts told us that it's nearly impossible for the average person to retrieve information from their phone once it's already lost or stolen. If your phone is lost or stolen, you'll still be able to access data on Instagram or even your to-do list app, since most apps store information in the cloud and send it to your phone when you need it. But all the little things that make your phone yours, such as your settings and backgrounds, the way you arrange your apps, and anything you might have saved locally in your Files app, can be saved only if you've backed them up beforehand. Both iOS and Android let you schedule regular automatic backups of all your apps and settings, which is absolutely essential. If you have a recent copy of your backup and don't need any of the information on the phone, you can remotely wipe all the data off it without losing too much. Otherwise, you're stuck trying to find and recover your phone. 3. Encrypt and back up your laptop. It can be particularly challenging to recover data from a stolen or lost laptop, since you're far more likely to have saved files to its hard drive rather than storing them in the cloud. By encrypting your hard drive, which is an option in both macOS and Windows, you can prevent attackers from extracting that data with their own tools if they don't have your password. We also recommend backing up your important files to an external hard drive that you store in a safe location, so you can recover your photos and documents even if your laptop is gone for good. 4. Use a password manager. A password manager is an essential service that we recommend to improve your online security. (We recommend 1Password or Bitwarden.) It works by creating and autofilling unique passwords for all of your accounts, and in turn you need to remember and safeguard only the master password to the password manager. Your data stays encrypted until the master password is entered, and you can deauthorize the device if it's stolen or lost to remove the potential of your passwords being accessed altogether. 5. Turn off message previews and lock Control Center access. If anyone looking at your phone can see messages as they pop up, that means thieves can also see two-factor authentication codes. That gives the thief an opportunity to crack into any accounts that send you a code when you log in. iOS and Android both give you the ability to hide message previews until your phone recognizes your face. (If you mark your phone as lost in the Find My feature, that automatically turns off message previews remotely.) You can also turn off certain features of the lock screen, such as the Control Center, which gives quick access to Wi-Fi and other settings, until the phone has been unlocked by facial recognition. Share this article with a friend. Prevention, as they say, is the best cure, but life doesn't always unfold so neatly. If your phone, tablet, or laptop gets lost or stolen right this moment, don't panic. Here are the things you should do. 1. If your device was stolen, report the theft. Immediately after your device is taken, report it stolen to the police. If the missing device is a phone, report it to your cell carrier. Many carriers require you to give a previously established PIN to verify your identity and will then freeze your number (for more details, see information from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) until you add a new phone. The carrier will then block the old phone's unique serial number from connecting to its network. 2. Remotely lock down the device. If you enabled the Find My feature prior to the loss or theft, both Apple and Google give you options to remotely lock down your device. For an iPhone, you can visit Find Devices and mark the item as lost. For an Android phone, navigate to the Secure device setting in Google's location-tracking tool. Locking down the device makes it harder for thieves to access your Google account, pay using saved cards, or see alerts. 3. Revoke access to apps and remove multi-factor authentication. If a thief has your phone and is able to unlock it somehow, you should limit their ability to receive one-time passwords for your bank, for instance, or use applications that are permanently logged in. We recommend removing your phone as a multi-factor authentication device if you haven't turned off message previews as recommended above, if you have an easy-to-guess password, or if your cell phone line isn't frozen yet. Ronnie Manning, chief brand advocate for security key maker Yubico, separately recommends making a list of your most sensitive accounts, such as Google or Facebook accounts that you use to log in to other accounts, and then revoke your device from those accounts if it's stolen. You can usually find these settings under names like 'Account Access' or 'Security.' 4. Erase the device. With the Find My feature enabled before loss or theft, both Apple and Google will allow you to wipe data such as apps and photos from your stolen or lost phone while still being able to track it. Note that you should only wipe the device's data using the Find My feature, not fully remove the device from your Apple or Google account — that would allow the thief to set it up as new. Now, it's time to get a new phone or laptop. Luckily, we have some recommendations. This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.
