Happy Sunday from Madrid, where it is Mother’s Day, and welcome back to Plane Thoughts.

We accept, almost intuitively, that our physical environment affects our state of mind. A tidy desk, a made bed, a clean kitchen. We know the difference how it feels to walk into a clear space, versus a cluttered one. The friction of mess is something we register before we articulate it.

Yet the environment most of us actually spend our time in is no longer physical. It is digital. Overflowing inboxes, files scattered across multiple cloud services, multiple browser tabs we will not return to, a phone full of unread notifications. We pour hours into this world every day, and rarely consider how disordered it has become.

The clutter is invisible, which is exactly why it costs us more than we notice. We cannot see our inboxes the way we can see our desks. There is no guest, no partner, no cleaner whose presence forces us to confront it. It accumulates in the background, and we adjust, the way we adjust to a slowly worsening posture.

Psychologists describe it as attention residue: the lingering cognitive cost of unfinished business that follows us from one task to the next. Each unread email, every half-organised folder, is a small open loop. Open loops consume working memory whether we attend to them or not.

The real cost is not the time we spend looking for things. It is the low background hum of unfinished business running underneath everything else we are trying to do.

Recently I’ve become increasingly conscious that my digital environment is making my mind feel cloudy.

I ordered a new laptop this week so I decided to use it as an opportunity to really start over digitally, across all my services and devices.

Over a few sessions with AI as a thinking partner, I rebuilt several systems from the ground up. I redesigned my email setup so that different parts of life are handled by different addresses, rather than one inbox doing multiple jobs at once. I set up a clean digital backbone on a new cloud server with a proper folder structure. I designed a lightweight personal CRM. I trimmed down and organised ever-growing folders of photos.

Most significantly, I completely redesigned how I work with AI itself, creating detailed and automatically updated context files and processes to draw from them, so that I am working far more efficiently.

I can genuinely say that the digital declutter has left my mind feeling less cluttered too. I’d describe it as a meaningful drop in a cognitive tax I had not fully realised I was paying.

Using AI for the design of many of my new systems has strengthened my belief in something I said a couple of weeks ago, on the value of AI as a thinking partner for the unglamorous but important architectural work in our lives. The output wasn’t some shiny deliverable, but instead a quieter mind, which for me is extremely valuable.

This week I invite you to think about your digital life as an extension of the physical environment you have designed for yourself. Does it reflect your ideals about tidiness, order and organisation?

— AJ

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