Episode 91
The Simplify Show
June 2, 2017 · Mike Murphy
EP91: THE SIMPLIFY SHOW How to simplify your personal, digital and business life to reduce stress and improve focus and productivity. Episode Summary: 12 Steps to Simplify Your Business & Personal Life How to Reduce Digital & Personal Clutter Improve Focus, Clarity & Productivity Reduce Stress & Increase Happines
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
- 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.
- 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.
- Unsubscribe from podcasts no longer being listened to (present company excepted, of course). The mindset: remove anything not actively used or needed.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
.zipand.dmgfile 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 Suite for nearly everything else, and deleting the rest.
- Simplify accounting and financials so the numbers are easy to reconcile. FreshBooks handles invoicing and expenses, an old-school bank ledger tracks transactions for monthly reconciliation, Mint.com serves as a backup, and one Google Sheet with expenses by category goes straight to the accountant at tax time.
Personal
- Reduce spending, both personal and business. This builds real awareness of what’s actually needed and breaks the reflex of buying on impulse — money gets saved, and most of the time the thing wasn’t necessary anyway.
- Clean the work environment. A nearly empty desk works well, even for creatives who assume mess equals inspiration — worth trying regardless.
- Clean personal space, room by room. Two frying pans and twenty plates are rarely all necessary. Go drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard, and let go of anything that’s been sitting unused and unidentified for years.
“Take what you need and leave the rest.” — The Band