Life hacking refers to any skill, trick, shortcut or method that boosts productivity and efficiency and saves you time. In our time-poor world, life hacks are essential, and you’re probably doing some of them without even knowing it.

Here are some technology life hacks that will save you time, effort, money, your battery life and might just make you sleep better.

1. Save your laptop battery life by not overcharging

According to WIRED magazine, you can prolong your laptop battery life by as much as four times by charging your battery to 80 percent and then letting it drain to 40 percent. The reason is explained: “each cell in a lithium-polymer battery is charged to a voltage level. The higher the charge percentage, the higher the voltage level. The more voltage a cell has to store, the more stress it’s put under. That stress leads to fewer discharge cycles.”

2. Use keyboard shortcuts

Mashgeek estimates that using helpful keyboard shortcuts on a PC could save you an hour a day, which can add up to three hours a week. Over the course of a career, that’s six months saved. Check out these 20 essential PC shortcuts to get you started.

3. Turn an old iPhone into an iPod touch

When you get an upgrade on your iPhone, you don’t need to give your old one away: just turn it into an iPod touch. Here’s how.

4. Make your computer glow more naturally

Staring at a bright computer screen late at night might make it difficult for you to sleep, because your brain thinks you’re looking at the sun. Download f.lux, a free app, which makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

5. Stop spam email from arriving in your inbox

Going through and deleting spam emails takes up precious time. To stop receiving marketing, spam and unsolicited email, just set up some email filters to block specific words such as unsubscribe.

6. Charge your phone in a hurry

If you don’t have much time to get your phone juiced up, put it onto airplane mode while it’s charging.

7. Unplug and reconnect

Technology life hacking is sometimes about disconnecting from tech to get things done. Use the app Unplug & Reconnect, which allows you to schedule a time for your phone to disconnect from surrounding networks and send a message to people who are trying to get hold of you to tell them that you’re unavailable for a couple of hours. Once the time you’ve scheduled for disconnecting is over, your phone goes back to normal. 

8. Clean your keyboard the cheap way

This is not a very sophisticated tip, but it is an easy one: clean the grime, sandwich crumbs and general stickyness that builds up between your keyboard keys by sliding the sticky ends of post its between the keys.

9. Use a password manager 

Stop using “password” or your birthday as passwords – you won’t be safe from hackers. Once you’ve switched over to using more complicated passwords, it’s hard to keep track of all the different ones. Don’t think of saving your passwords in your browser – use a password manager instead. Download LastPass and come up with a strong master password, then it will save your login details for the various sites you use and sync your data securely across all of your devices.