Episode Summary: 12 concrete steps to simplify personal, digital, and business life — reducing stress, sharpening focus, and clearing the clutter that gets in the way of actually creating.

What You'll Learn

• 12 concrete steps to simplify digital, business, and personal life
• Why buying gear before building momentum is a common early-business trap
• A practical Inbox Zero and email-unsubscribe workflow
• How reducing spending and cleaning physical space feed back into clearer thinking

Tip #1, before the list even starts: when launching an online business, buy only what's genuinely needed — don't over-invest in gear, branding, or logos before there's real momentum, because direction almost always shifts early on. Too much video production gear got purchased before any videos were even being made, and the direction changed anyway. Less is more.

12 Steps to Simplifying Business & Life

Digital

1. Clean up the email inbox and aim for Inbox Zero, even briefly. Start by deleting obvious junk, then create one catch-all folder — "To Do," "To Sort," or "To Follow Up" — and move everything else there to reset the inbox. The messages aren't gone, but starting clean often kickstarts real follow-through.
2. Unsubscribe from email newsletters, stores, and brand lists. Less incoming noise means less reacting to things that don't actually matter. Unroll.me is a solid tool for batch-unsubscribing.
3. Unsubscribe from podcasts no longer being listened to (present company excepted, of course). The mindset: remove anything not actively used or needed.
4. Leave Facebook groups and YouTube subscriptions, and run a full social media audit. Over 1,500 Instagram and Twitter accounts with no clear reason for following got cut in one pass — a genuinely great, clarifying feeling.
5. Delete unused apps and software on phone and computer. Going from 9 home screens down to 4 proved the point: anything actually needed can always be redownloaded. Ten to-do apps and three movie-review apps were never necessary, and the phone runs faster besides.
6. Organize and back up photos. Losing every photo is a real fear worth acting on. Start by gathering everything — every device, every hard drive, iCloud, Google Drive, iPhoto — into one master "Photo Library" folder, the single thing that always gets backed up going forward. Lightroom or iPhoto can then organize it, starting simply by year.
7. Clean up the computer, starting with the desktop. A cluttered desktop is a quiet but real source of stress — it should hold only active projects. Then tackle the Downloads folder and delete every forgotten .zip and .dmg file sitting there.

Business & Financials

Consolidate productivity and to-do tools. Bouncing between Notes, Todoist, Asana, and Evernote often creates more friction than it solves — the fix was settling on the iPhone's default Notes and Reminders apps plus G…

Read the complete show notes and resources on mikemurphy.ai.

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