Overwhelmed by everything in your digital life? With the help of a few handy tips and apps, you can regain control

Written by Alex blake

Spend any amount of time with your Apple kit and it can quickly feel overwhelming, with notifications, emails, alerts and alarms barraging you left, right and centre.

With so many digital devices in our lives, it can very quickly overload even the most efficient of multitaskers. It’s enough to make you want to bury your head in the sand.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to break the cycle and declutter, helping to bring a much-needed dose of tranquillity to everything you do. Whether that’s focusing on important work or minimising the time spent on repetitive chores, there are loads of ways to cut out the cruft. And that’s what we aim to cover in this feature. From automation apps that can perform your tedious tasks to one-click time-savers and visual simplifiers, we’ve rounded up the best apps help you stay on track.

With our handy focus tips, you’ll be back in the driver’s seat in next to no time.

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SIMPLIFY YOUR MAC

Feeling overpowered by the mess on your Mac? These handy apps will dust away the clutter and streamline your computer like never before

Whether you use a Mac for work or play, it doesn’t take long for it to get overloaded with stuff. Before you know it, your desktop’s a mess, your documents are all over the place and you’re left wondering how to fix it.

At the same time, there are so many tasks that we all do on our Macs that are much more complicated than they need to be. The result is you spend so much time doing tedious chores that just turning your Mac on is an anxiety-inducing exercise. Combined, these two issues can take the fun out of the Mac.

On this page, we aim to solve both problems with a range of apps that can tidy up your Mac and sort out those niggling tasks that you just hate doing. Without the mess clogging up your system, you’ll be able to get on with more important jobs without the clutter stifling your workflow.

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Zapier

Free (offers in-app purchases) FROM Zapier Inc, zapier.com Zapier is an easy-to-use automation website that lets you build workflows for over 2,000 apps and web services. For instance, when a colleague sends an email attachment, you can have the file automatically downloaded and shared to your team’s Dropbox folder. Handy.

Alfred

Free (offers IAPs) FROM Running with Crayons, alfredapp.com NEEDS OS X 10.11 or later

Restore order with Alfred, an all-in-one assistant. Use it to automate repetitive tasks, locate hard-to-find files, control your computer and more. It has a handy text expansion tool, integrates with 1Password, and supports hotkeys.