🥁 The 2026 Digital Spring Cleaning Guide

A choose-your-own-adventure attention reset for creative work

Starting next week, this newsletter will look a little different. More soon…

I’m Allison Stadd, jazz drummer, CMO, and highly caffeinated mom of two, writing about how to lead with more creativity inside corporate life.

Opening Note:

The full OffBeat playlist

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Last year’s digital spring cleaning guide focused on tuning up your workspace (organizing files, streamlining tools) to create a cleaner, more efficient operating system.

This year is different.

In 2026, the issue is not clutter on your desktop (although I still swear by these 20 tips and 11 tools to handle that).

It’s clutter in your brain.

We are living inside systems engineered to fragment focus and reward responsiveness. We’re in a constant state of reaction rather than reflection.

So instead of polishing your tools, we’re going to audit what’s sapping you.

If we want more creative work, we must redesign our digital environment to protect creative cognition, that fragile, easily crowded-out brain space where original thinking happens.

First, a caveat: this is a choose-your-own-adventure reset.

Experiment. Pick the section that feels most urgent, or most energizing, or most doable in 20 minutes and start there.

Some of these suggestions will resonate, and others won’t. Your digital environment should reflect how you work best.

Let’s get after it.

Do a Digital Energy Audit

Create a note or doc with three columns:

• Energizing

• Neutral

• Depleting

Then for one week, set yourself a 3X/day calendar reminder or labeled alarm to reflect on and categorize how the ways you’ve spent your time felt.

Think about the meetings you attended, Slack threads you read, news you consumed, podcasts you listened to, feeds you scrolled.

You’re going to notice interesting things; e.g. maybe 1-1 meetings without an agenda are exhausting. Maybe every time you open a certain app you get an unexpected burst of energy. Maybe the hour you spent head down working on a strategy deck with Slack closed made you feel like a million bucks.

At the end of the week, do your absolute best to remove all the depleting things. Delegate the meetings, delete the apps, exit the Slack channels, etc. And contemplate how to prioritize the energizing things.

Yes, this is sort of an annoying exercise—like keeping a money diary or food journal—but it’s short and the psychological payoff will be worth it. You can’t observe patterns and trends without objectively tracking. To make it as simple as possible, check out the energy map worksheet from Designing Your Life.

Make Filters Your Friend

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters so I’ve got a Gmail filter for each to be automatically labeled “Newsletters.” My brain enjoys having them categorized so when I’m in a newsletter-reading headspace they’re handy.

I also file thought-provoking emails into an “Inspiration” folder. And any online shopping receipts, bills, and ticket confirmations get tucked into “Receipts/Confirmations.”

You can also use email filters to auto-label client emails, flag messages from your boss, archive recurring reports, or send promotional emails straight to a “Read Later” folder.

Color-Code Like Your Life Depends on It

I color-code like a fiend in Google Calendar. For example, my workouts, strategic thinking time blocks, and family time blocks are each a different color than my meetings. This helps me gauge at a glance how my day and week are shaping up.

I also use color-coding for categorizing my Google Drive folders (work and personal) and my Google Keep to-do’s (work).

It makes attention allocation visible AND decreases cognitive load. Who doesn’t love a twofer?

Make a Professional Yearbook

I screenshot meaningful work comments, shout-outs, and feedback and save them in an iCloud Photos album for each company I’ve worked at. I add actual photos and videos from my time there, too, so each album serves as a multi-year professional yearbook of sorts.

It consolidates wins into a single visual archive so I can see evidence of my impact at a glance when I need it.

Whenever you get a shout-out in the comments at a company Town Hall, a kind email, a congratulatory Slack message, or any more formal recognition, screenshot or download it and save it to an album. If you work for yourself you can organize the albums by year instead of company name.

Get Tactile

I assume you, too, spend a large part of your day looking at a screen. Our poor eyes. Our poor brains.

I’m a firm believer in counterbalancing all-day digital overload with physical textures.

• Get a nice notebook and pen and take notes by hand.

• Buy a fun fidget spinner.

• Plan your week on paper.

• Give your e-reader a rest and stick to physical books for a while. And really get in there: dog-ear them, scribble in and highlight them (unless they’re library books, duh), make an edge index on their fore-edge.

Do a “Default Settings” Reset

Why can’t you power down and reboot your brain the way you do with your laptop and phone?

Do a 30-minute settings audit across your technology:

• App notifications

• Meeting length defaults (try 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30/60)

• Phone home screen layout

• Podcast playback speed

• Social media feed preferences and muted words/accounts

• Read receipt and typing indicator settings on messaging apps

• "Do Not Disturb" schedule

Ask yourself: If I were setting all this up from scratch today, would I set it up this way?

Build a “One Source of Truth” Rule

For every category of work, pick one primary tool:

• Task management

• Notes and reference

• Calendar

• Files and documents

• Bookmarks and saved content

The test: if someone asks you “where would I find that?” you should be able to answer without thinking.

Fragmented systems fragment attention.

Lay Down a Digital Dropcloth

I love this idea from Seth Godin: much as house painters painstakingly lay down dropcloths before they start painting the walls, we should ensure our files and tools are organized and protected before we begin work.

He writes, “Using templates, master sheets and structured ways to hold data is far more resilient than simply putting some text and images on the page in a way that looks good.”

I used to save dozens of critical files on my laptop’s desktop for easy access. Then my work computer crashed. I.T. had to reboot it, and everything was wiped. I despaired. Then I resolved to never store anything on my desktop that wasn't easily accessible elsewhere. I still like having "cheat sheet" materials at hand, like quarterly goals, color palette hex codes, and other reference docs; I just keep them in a Google Drive folder vs. stored locally.

Have Fun With Your Tech

Clean doesn’t mean boring. Once you’ve got things spic and span, sprinkle in some confetti.

I love this idea from anya:

Other thought starters:

• Set your laptop desktop background to be an image of gold mylar balloons spelling something fun (chatGPT or Canva can help you make it)

• Include a funny or endearing word in a password you use often

• Create a silly new custom Slack emoji

• Stick googly eyes on your office supplies

None of this, I promise, is about perfection. And it’s not about optimization for optimization’s sake.

It’s about designing conditions where juicier, richer thinking becomes your default.

It’s about protecting your decision energy.

Reclaiming psychological space.

We cannot create better work if we don't name what's draining us, stop doing other people's cognitive laundry, and fiercely protect the conditions where original thinking happens.

And none of that is going to magically, interventionlessly happen.

Have a great week,

Allison

P.S. You can also pick up my handy Digital Spring Cleaning checklist right here.

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🔗 Hang out with me me on LinkedIn for more music-inflected takes on leadership and marketing

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