New year: Five ways tech can spring clean your life

From decluttering your inbox to decluttering your life, there’s an app (or two) for that


Clean up your inbox

Is your inbox groaning under the weight of marketing emails you signed up for and promptly forgot about? Unroll.me is a good way to declutter your inbox and make sure you can find email that is actually important. It's a matter of downloading the app, logging into your chosen email address and allowing Unroll.me to scan all your email to find subscriptions. In the space of a couple of minutes, I'd unsubscribed to 88 newsletters and "rolled up" another 26, which drops them into a daily digest of the emails sent by Unroll.me every day. Less inbox clutter, less stress, much easier to find the important stuff. It supports Google, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook. com and AOL email accounts.

Another option is Filtr, which scans your Gmail account, finds frequent senders to your account and allows you to schedule when these will arrive in your inbox. That way you can keep less important emails out of your inbox until the end of the day, when you might have more time to deal with them, and allow more urgent requests to take priority.

Clean up your home

Maybe you need more than a metaphorical spring clean of your life. That's when Hassle. com is a very handy thing to know about. You can book a cleaner to come the very next day and tackle some of the tasks you would either rather not, or don't have time for. If you prefer to do things yourself, you could take a look at FlyLadyPlus, which provides a list of routines that can help you get your home and life in order. You can sign up for the premium courses that teach you all you need to know about organising your home or you can go to the FlyLady website (flylady.net) and look up the specifics on the various tasks.

Air your dirty laundry

In a similar vein to Hassle.com is Laundrie. The app allows you to arrange for your laundry or dry cleaning to be picked up at a time and (Dublin-focused) location that suits you. They will then take it all away, sort it out and return it, again at a time and location that suits you. Another option is Laundryheap.ie. Like, Laundrie, the service is available in limited areas, but if you're outside, Dublin, check out Sproose.

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Sort out your life goals

Let’s face it, we all need a bit of help to get motivated and change our lives from time to time. Coach.me focuses on building habits and tracking your goals, presumably with the idea that it will help you to form the habits to the point where you no longer need the app to prompt you. You can set up a range of goals, from personal growth and improving your relationships, to learning a new skill and eating healthily or quitting a bad habit.

Rein in your spending

The dreaded B word: budget. It’s something we should probably all look at but the idea of making a budget and having to stick to it is just so dull. Wally, an app that will help you track your spending and stick to your goals. Every expense is recorded, you can scan receipts and see where all your money is going, plus how much you are projected to save each month. The app will also predict your future behaviour, once you give it enough information.