Click here to read other articles in this series:

• Digital Hygiene in the Age of Data:

  • Search: the foundation of hygiene

  • Calendars and checklists

  • Using your browser

  • Social media and news

  • Digital safety & privacy

  • Email

  • Backup and the cloud

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The overwhelming homecoming

The person leading the video meeting shared their screen, including scores of open browser tabs. It’s a chummy bunch, so I exclaimed, “Dude, learn to use tab groups!” She sighed and said she’d meant to but she was too busy.

You are never too busy to learn how to make your digital life simpler, because once your digital life is simpler everything will feel less stressful. In the meeting, someone asked me what I meant about tab groups, so I shared my screen and demonstrated my system. We got into a good conversation about digital hygiene, and when we were done, one of the people who hadn’t been actively involved turned on her mic.

“I just got home from bereavement leave, and when I opened up my computer this morning the chaos was exactly as I’d left it. I almost started to cry! While you were talking about digital hygiene I went and organized all my tabs and I feel so much better.”

It was this feedback that motivated me to finish writing this series! When you’re at a computer, your browser is your window into the Internet. It’s important to choose the one that works for you and set it up in a way that helps you feel calm.

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Step 1: Choose a browser

I actually use three browsers, which is probably not necessary for you! But you should choose one to use and depend on:

• Firefox, Brave, and Duck Duck Go are the most private. (I’ll address privacy issues in a future post.) But they are also the least-used, and are often not the right choice for any web software that uses a microphone or camera.

• Apple users tend to use Safari, but I don’t recommend it. It’s got no particular advantage, and some audio-video software doesn’t work well in it. Same story with Edge and any other browser that comes pre-installed on your computer, but if you like it and it suits your needs, it’s fine.

• Chrome is the most powerful, least buggy, and overall best browser. But it is Google, and I won’t blame you if you want to avoid it. Check out the Digital Safety article in this series for safety tips that work in Chrome.

Note: the rest of my tips refer to Chrome because that’s where I do most of my work. Other browsers have similar features.

Step 2: Organize your tabs

Browser vocabulary: a tab is a single website that you are visiting. A window is the main interface of the browser, which can have many tabs.

The two features that I depend on are pinned tabs and tab groups. Here is my layout in my main browser window:

The four sites I visit a lot are pinned at the left. Pinned tabs should be sites that you use every day regardless of what task you’re working on.

I have seven tab groups in this window. The first one is where I throw random videos and articles I want to read for fun. I do that when I’m busy and they aren’t important, and frankly, I often end up closing these tabs because I’ve lost interest. This is good, not a failure: putting them in the tab group removes the mental load and closing them acknowledges that they aren’t important enough to spend our precious time on.

The important categories in my life follow the Entertainment group. I’ll highlight two of them to show how I use these groups to lighten my mental load.

• Babblery: This tab group has everything I need in order to produce and promote my podcast. It has a lot of tabs in it! For example, it’s got the two sites where I upload my shows for distribution. It has my Babblery website dashboard since I go there all the time. And it has a couple of Google docs full of links and information that I use for every show.

• Social: I seldom use social media for personal reasons so these are work-related links. Each time I need to do promotion for a show or event, I put the information in a Google doc (which is kept in the Babblery tab as long as it’s current) and then copy and paste into the various portals for posting on social media.1 My social media process generally takes about one to five minutes because I’ve got it all set up.

Tip 2: Organize your windows and logins

Chrome and other browsers allow you to create multiple profiles, which is really useful. If you are one person with one job and no dependents, you may be good to go with one. But I love having each of my selves in different windows. My selves currently are:

• My personal and work self, also including my teaching, radio show, and Substack

• My KSQD volunteer self

• My Jazz Society newsletter editor self

• My KidsLearn self, including teaching and my much-neglected KidsLearn Substack and podcast2

Each of these windows has a different profile, and this is key. I can define different areas of my life and hide them when I’m not working on them—that frees up a lot of brain space.

You can open a new window with control/command-n or choose it in the file menu:

In Chrome and other browsers you can click on your icon in the upper right (if you’ve set up a profile image, it will be your image) and choose Add Profile.

In any case, if you have a different window for personal and work, you can minimize or hide the one you aren’t working on and it… disappears! Gone from your mind! For example, I always keep my newsletter editing job minimized until it’s time to work on it—I don’t want to have it on my mind all the time.

Tip 3: Don’t keep random stuff around

We’ll feel best if we’re frank with ourselves: One time I kept a video that I had no interest in open in my browser for months because I really felt that I should watch it and send a thank you to the person who recommended it. But the thing is, I didn’t have the time and seeing it there was making me feel bad. That person had probably forgotten they sent it to me—it wasn’t deeply important to them. So the day I closed it? Mental load lifted!

If you feel bad about closing a tab, put the link in your checklist (see how it’s better than paper?) so you can get to it another time. Keeping too many “I’ll get to it someday” tabs can make you feel busier than you are.

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Final tip: Don’t forget to practice daily digital hygiene

At the end of the day, close up all your tab groups. Occasionally I’ll choose a tab to keep open so that I am faced with it in the morning. But most of the time, it’s not useful to be faced with yesterday’s digital mess in the morning—it’s dispiriting and makes you feel busier.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading my Digital Hygiene series!

I hope you are enjoying this tour of Digital Hygiene tips.

• Please share with others: here’s the full series link

• If you found it valuable, please support The Babblery:

Buy some Digital Hygiene soap

Subscribe now

The Babblery can use your support. Please comment on, like, and share this post. Recommend our publication to your friends. Become a paid subscriber. Buy us a coffee. Buy Wally and Tabitha some cat food. Listen to KSQD. Be awesome and carry on.

Big tipper

If you enjoy podcasts, please subscribe to the Babblery on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Click here to read other articles in this series:

• Digital Hygiene in the Age of Data:

  • Search: the foundation of hygiene

  • Calendars and checklists

  • Using your browser

  • Social media and news

  • Digital safety & privacy

  • Email

  • Backup and the cloud

Subscribe now

The missed haircuts

In the 90s my sister and I ran a graphic/web design business out of my future baby’s room. I had always been a diligent keeper of weekly planners—I saved them from every single year. As a college instructor, my previous career, I’d never missed an appointment. But designing on the computer grabbed my attention like nothing ever had. One week I missed a haircut appointment, which was embarrassing enough. Then I missed the rescheduled appointment. Time to give in to the fact that my brain now lived on my computer!

Our lives are now filled with enormous amounts of information, and it’s gotten easier than ever to forget appointments, misplace emails, and feel absolutely frantic about how much needs to be done. It’s that mental load that I hope to help you calm down, and using digital calendars and checklists will help.

Note about this series: Below you will find General Advice—no directions. Your job will be to use the search terms I give you in each situation and find the instructions for yourself. Don’t worry: You can do it! Even if you have thousands of emails in your inbox, you can do it.

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Digital calendars

Digital calendars have four advantages over your beloved planner:

1. They go everywhere your phone goes, and they’re on your computer, too

2. They can make annoying sounds to get your attention

3. They can link to other digital information

4. They can be shared with multiple people

Calendar apps are free and easy to use. If you’re fully in the Apple world, use Apple Calendar (which can also import Google calendars). If you’re fully in the Google world, use Google Calendar. If, like me, you’re a mix of both, you’re lucky that they work together pretty seamlessly.

Don’t put all your appointments on one calendar. Create different calendars, which allows you to turn them off and on. For example, my extended family has a shared calendar. If a large number of events on that calendar is making me feel like there’s too much going on, I just hide that calendar.

Adjust your calendar’s settings so that a new event is automatically set to remind you with alerts. When you don’t want alerts, you can turn them off in individual events.

Set repeating reminders for tasks you tend to forget. This is a huge part of relieving your mental load. For example, I have a repeating alert to remind me to sign up for swim slots—I don’t want to worry about whether I’ll remember before all the lanes are taken.

Set up shared calendars for multi-person households. My household has a calendar where, for example, we put all of our out-of-the-house events. That’s how we share a single EV effectively.

Remember that SEARCH works in calendar apps. Forgot how old your friend is but remember that you went to her fiftieth birthday party? Search for that and you’ll find out what year she was born.

Is something about your calendar app mystifying you? Use your browser to search for tips. Generally you’ll get the best information from the app company itself. Disregard any advice that’s more than a couple of years old. Do not trust AI results: they are only 90% correct which means 10% of the time they will just be a waste of time.

Checklist and to-do list software

I was recently complimented by someone that I’d remembered to complete a task that many others in the organization forget, and I responded, “It is on my checklist, so of course I did it!” I am a maniac at keeping checklists because if I weren’t, I’d fall apart. I am not only a writer: I am a radio host, sound editor, teacher, and musician, not to mention daughter, mother, wife, and friend. I help my parents take care of their finances. I also love to listen to music, watch shows and films, and keep my family’s photo archive. I have to-do lists for all of those pursuits!

Choose an app that works on all of your devices. I have one foot in the Apple world and the other in Android, so I ended up with a third-party app. It syncs to my phone where it pops up reminders that I set for specific items. (This can also be done in my calendar, but the to do item doesn’t disappear in time—it sticks around to annoy me till I check it off.)

Choose the app that works for your style. I tried Google Keep and it just didn’t work for me. All old my crap is still in there in a huge, messy heap because I abandoned it for a more orderly ship. But my messy heap might be your pot of gold.

If you work with others, choose an app together that allows shared tasks. Again, you can do this with your calendar, but the to-do list works better for me.

Every single day, bring important items to the top and complete or postpone them. My to-do app has a “My Day” feature which is my lifeline. In the evening or first thing in the morning, I shuffle through tasks and choose a few to highlight for the day. If the date is really important I create a due date within the item, but usually just need to see them there to remind me.

If you’re not ever really going to do a task, remove it. You might want to keep a “box of broken toys” checklist for old items that you never got around to. But make sure that your active lists are fresh. (And yes, this is the biggest challenge for me.)

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Final tip: Don’t forget to practice daily digital hygiene

Did you agree to meet a friend but forget to put it on the calendar? Do it. Is there a task you keep meaning to do but keep forgetting about? Put it on your to do list with a reminder or due date.

Remember: If you only spend a few minutes a day on digital hygiene, you can lighten your mental load. You’ll feel saner, more in control, and more ready to take on important challenges that you’ve been putting off.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading my Digital Hygiene series!

I hope you are enjoying this tour of Digital Hygiene tips.

• Please share with others: here’s the full series link

• If you found it valuable, please support The Babblery:

Tip for Digital Hygiene series

Upgrade 'cause this was cool

The Babblery can use your support. Please comment on, like, and share this post. Recommend our publication to your friends. Become a paid subscriber. Buy us a coffee. Buy Wally and Tabitha some cat food. Listen to KSQD. Be awesome and carry on.

Big tipper

If you enjoy podcasts, please subscribe to the Babblery on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Click to read other articles in this series:

• Digital Hygiene in the Age of Data:

  • Calendars and checklists

  • Using your browser

  • Social media and news

  • Digital safety & privacy

  • Email

  • Backup and the cloud

Subscribe now

The baffled friend

One day I was talking to a friend who couldn’t find a particular setting on her computer. I said, “just type [KEYWORD] into the search box.” This very computer-literate person with a master’s degree said, “Oh, I guess I never noticed there was a search box in settings.”

In today’s digital world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by screens full of scrolling details. But except in very, very bad software, there is always a search. And good search skills can save your sanity, I promise. Here are a few tips.

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Tip 1: Ignore AI search results

Right now, searching leads to AI results, and AI results are not reliable. Please ignore, scroll past, or turn off. I recommend you TURN AI SEARCH OFF. If for some reason you like reading crap that is probably not true and also like generating more greenhouse gases in order to create untrue crap, leave the results on, but ignore AI search for any technical advice.

Tip 2: Ignore “sponsored” or “paid” search results

What you’re looking for is “organic” search results, and unfortunately, those seldom come at the top of search results. If you were a techie person you’d install software to block them, but since you’re here, I’ll just offer you this piece of advice: Always scroll past sponsored results, never click. You are significantly less likely to find what you’re looking for if you click on a paid search result.

Tip 3: When trying to find information in apps or long documents, always use the search box before scrolling

Oh, but scrolling is so easy, right? I’ll just check to see if I can find it. How many times have you said that and found yourself an hour later engrossed in something completely unrelated to your original task? Aimless scrolling is the curse of the modern age and you must resist it.

Here are a few examples:

• I dump information into a note-taking app—I have 3600 notes! There is no point to scrolling. The app’s search isn’t great, but it does find keywords.

• Settings on your phone and computer have become very unwieldy. Always use search terms to find what you need.

• Clicking around on a large website full of information is a waste of time. Use the website’s search box or see below to use a search engine.

Remember that command/control-F works in many situations.

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Tip 4: Learn to format your searches

AI searching is popular because it’s so “easy”—you just type your question. But learning a few tips about conventional searching will lead you to much better results. I suggest you read this good guide from Common Sense Media. Most importantly, use quotation marks:

• Put “quotes” around all words that must appear in your “search” results.

• When searching for a very specific term like an error message, put the exact text of the message in quotes.

• If you only want search results from a specific website, start with site:[websitename].[domainextension] Example: site:apple.com

Tip 5: Include all the relevant information

Make sure your search details include all relevant information about which hardware and software you are using. If I search for “how to turn off notifications” I will not necessarily get information about the device I’m using (phone, computer) or the operating system (MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS).

Too much irrelevant information is overwhelming and leads to information overload.

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Tip 6: Get tech advice only from trusted sources

Get your advice from trusted sources such as the software developer website and check the date to make sure it’s current. Don’t trust social media for answers about technology. Don’t waste your time by sorting through advice from random blogs when your software’s developer already offers the correct advice. Go to the trusted source first.1

Final tip: Don’t forget to practice daily digital hygiene

You might be tempted to think that you can just “flip through and find it.” But endless scrolling is part of the unnecessary mental load I hope you stop carrying around with you. Learn to search well, and then remember to search as your first step, not as a remedy for being frustrated.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading my Digital Hygiene series!

I hope you are enjoying this tour of Digital Hygiene tips.

• Please share with others: here’s the full series link

• If you found it valuable, please support The Babblery:

Tip for Digital Hygiene series

Upgrade 'cause this was cool

The Babblery can use your support. Please comment on, like, and share this post. Recommend our publication to your friends. Become a paid subscriber. Buy us a coffee. Buy Wally and Tabitha some cat food. Listen to KSQD. Be awesome and carry on.

Big tipper

If you enjoy podcasts, please subscribe to the Babblery on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Subscribe now

I’ve been wanting to write about digital hygiene for a while, but a voice always says to me, how can you write about that when this is happening? Feel free to insert your own that and this—mine is: why worry about how your digital life is organized when the world is falling apart?

Here’s why I decided to do this series:

When I talk to people I know, fully functional people who know how to take care of their car, perform their demanding job, and even use their TV remote, I find that they are mystified about keeping themselves safe and sane in the digital era. I call the ability to keep up with your digital life on a daily basis “digital hygiene.” And here’s a promise: getting control of just one area of your digital world can change your life.

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Digital Hygiene in a Nutshell

Digital hygiene is a daily practice—much of it taking no more time than brushing your teeth and showering—that will keep your digital life from blowing up out of proportion. Some of it will require time up front to set up processes. But I can absolutely promise you that once you set up your processes and stick with them, your inbox will be more manageable, your connections to others will be more fulfilling, and you won’t be followed by a cloud of digital shame that keeps you from focusing on what’s important.

7 Weeks of Hygiene

This is a special series from the Babblery. The posts cover:

• Search: the foundation of hygiene

• Calendars and checklists

• Using your browser

• Social media and news—coming soon!

• Digital safety & privacy—coming soon!

• Email—coming soon!

• Backup and the cloud—coming soon!

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Scrub your Digital Life Clean

This series features simple ideas that can change your relationship with your digital life, published every Sunday for seven weeks. If you want to commit to making some changes, plan to spend anywhere from a few minutes to an hour to implement my suggestions.

If you’re too busy to start now, save the link for later. You’ll find all the Digital Hygiene posts archived here in the future if you decide to take the plunge.

Leave a comment

The Babblery can use your support. Please comment on, like, and share this post. Recommend our publication to your friends. Become a paid subscriber. Buy us a coffee. Buy Wally and Tabitha some cat food. Listen to KSQD. Be awesome and carry on.

Big tipper

If you enjoy podcasts, please subscribe to the Babblery on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.