This time of year- a time of new resolutions-is a great time to resolve to remove the invisible time wasters in our digital lives.

I will admit that I’m guilty of occasionally glancing over at the screens of people sitting next to me on planes– so sue me.

When I do, I’m blown away by how full the inboxes are and how many notifications people have.

Most nights, I go to bed with inbox zero and I only allow a few apps to do notifications.

Every email, every notification, every sound, is a time stealer from our lives.

When an email hits my inbox and it’s irrelevant, I ask myself, how many of these have been irrelevant in the past few months?

If the number meets a minimum threshold, I make the extra time investment to unsubscribe vs. delete. It’s an ROI equation.

I do the same for app notifications.

And apps.

And people I follow on various platforms.

If there’s more noise than signal, especially when it’s by a wide margin, I take it out back behind the barn and shoot it.

One of the competitive advantages of the Digital Age is going to be the ability to Control Your Attention (CYA).

Whether it’s meditation or Shabbat observance or just the regular practice of digital cleansing and noise reduction, I suspect the most successful people will be those who can tell the devices where to spend their time, not the other way around.

And bonus hack: