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If we’re going to make New Year’s resolutions, few areas of life have as much potential for payoff as how we use technology products. After all, the whole point of many of them is to help us get more done with less effort. And yet, there’s no denying that tech can also waste vast amounts of time—which, if we got it back, we could divert to more rewarding pursuits.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself as I think about what I’d like to achieve in 2024. These are my top five goals for the year—at least the ones that involve sitting in front of a device with a screen on it:

1. I promise to get my email under control. Like losing a few pounds or cleaning out the garage, this resolution is an evergreen, but tough to achieve with any permanence. Back in February, I wrote about my experiences with 37signals’ Hey, a clever Gmail alternative with an emphasis on preventing inbox overload. I’m still using it, and it helps. But Hey isn’t a miracle cure, and it didn’t add much in the way of new features I find useful this year. (That may be because 37signals has been busy working on a new calendar feature that’s due early this year.)

I recently opted for an email workflow that involves reviving my Gmail account but routing it into Hey and doing almost all my email management there. For the moment, this seems like the best way to get Hey’s benefits without sacrificing everything that’s good about Gmail, like its compatibility with third-party tools, such as the nifty Matter newsletter reader. Ultimately, though, I’m resigned to the fact that email isn’t a problem that technology is going to fix for me. In fact, it’s more likely to mess things up further.

2. I’ll tiptoe into the AI age. In 2023, I spent far more time goofing off with AI products such as ChatGPT than using them to accomplish anything of importance. I don’t feel guilty about that: ChatGPT and all its bot brethren are still prone to making stuff up, which zeroes out any potential value as research tools. (If you don’t believe me, ask Michael Cohen.)

Still, clever AI is weaving its way into more aspects of my everyday life. For instance, I just switched to the excellent Mastodon client Ice Cubes mostly because it auto-generates descriptions of images I share that are better than the ones I’d write myself. Two AI tools I use almost every day—Grammarly and the transcription service, Temi—have also made me better at my work. In 2024, I’m going to make a point of auditioning more AI-infused products, and I expect to find some winners.

3. I’ll clear out my online storage clutter. Google has recently been pelting me with warnings that I’m about to run out of space for Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. That’s despite the fact that I pay for a truly whopping 5 TB, on top of additional space on Dropbox and iCloud. There’s no way I need all the files I’ve squirreled away, and holding onto all of them only makes it harder to find the items I would like to keep forever. So I plan to do some serious spring cleaning—not just of my Google detritus, but also other digital repositories, such as my Apple Photos library, where I’ve somehow ended up with 93,507 images. (I figure roughly half of them are screenshots I took by mistake.)

4. I’ll read more e-books. In May, I wrote about my new Kobo e-reader, and how its easy-on-the-eyes screen and distraction-free interface made long-form reading a pleasure. Well, full disclosure: It broke shortly after that, and I haven’t gotten around to fixing or replacing it. For now, I’m back to reading on my 11-inch iPad Pro. But on one device or another, I plan to continue burrowing through my giant-size library of e-books, many of which I paid for but have never read in their entirety. I can’t think of a better way to spend the hours I previously spent glued to Twitter.

5. I’ll find life after Twitter. Speaking of Twitter: Early in Elon Musk’s reign of error—before the X rebrand—I explained why I wasn’t leaving the service. I’m still there, mostly because some of my favorite users haven’t (yet) abandoned it. But as it gets dumber and dumber (and dumber and dumber), I find less and less reason to give it my full attention. And while I’ve had some good times on Mastodon, Bluesky, and other would-be Twitter replacements, none of them scratches the same itch Twitter once satisfied.

I’m increasingly convinced that it’s silly for any social network even to try to be the new Twitter, since so much of its appeal resulted from happenstance rather than a replicable plan. In 2024, I hope to spend as little time as possible mourning its loss or pretending that something else can replace it. When the next great social network comes along, we’ll know—and odds are, it won’t be a knockoff of anything we’ve seen before.

I could go on. But if all I do is make progress on these five fronts in 2024, I’ll have accomplished something meaningful. (My colleague Rob Pegoraro shared his own resolutions, all of them different from mine—but at least or or two of which I might adopt as well.)

Maybe I’ll report back in January 2025 on how I did. In the meantime, if you’ve got any New Year’s tech resolutions of your own, tell me about them. Unless you request otherwise, I might quote you in a future newsletter.