When having to finish some work we are usually quite eager to do so in the most efficient way to avoid wasting precious time. Not only is it important to think about the tasks at hand, but also to remember the things that we shouldn’t bug ourselves with.

One of the most common time-wasters in our daily (internet) life are social networks like Twitter as well as traditional email and the web. All those services should help us finding useful and exciting information, but unfortunately they all have great potential for flooding us with content that we are not exactly interested in.

Many modern Twitter clients give the user the option to mute content. The chances are high that your favorite client will not only let you hide tweets from specific users, but also let you mute certain clients and hashtags. This will help you to keep your timeline neat and clean, only displaying the tweets that you want to see.

Similar advice is also true for the dinosaur in digital communication. Every modern E-Mail client has configuration options to define custom filtering rules. With them you can flag or highlight emails from people that are important to you or emails that contain certain keywords. It is advisable to move incoming mails into specified folders for easier digesting. Many of nowadays’ mail clients also include already built-in spam filters to keep those unwanted emails away from you.

Thanks to the ability of making web-sites more and more interactive, which some not so skillful web designers use to hide content from visitors instead of emphasizing it, consuming news directly from the web became more and more cumbersome. A good solution to overcome this problem is to utilize feed readers to subscribe to news feeds basically provided by every content delivery website. New articles of your frequented websites will be channeled into the application where they can be read quickly in one place instead having to surf across many different website every day.

All of this small recommendations have one thing in common: They will hide unwanted information from you, thus helping you to focus on the stuff you want to see and making it less likely to miss information that you are interested in.

The applications I use:

• Twitter: Tweetbot
• E-Mail: Mail.app
• News Reader: Reeder