  Let $A \subset \mathbb{R}$ be finite. We quantitatively improve the
Balog-Wooley decomposition, that is $A$ can be partitioned into sets $B$ and
$C$ such that $$\max\{E^+(B) , E^{\times}(C)\} \lesssim |A|^{3 - 7/26}, \ \
\max \{E^+(B,A) , E^{\times}(C, A) \}\lesssim |A|^{3 - 1/4}.$$ We use similar
decompositions to improve upon various sum-product estimates. For instance, we
show $$ |A+A| + |A A| \gtrsim |A|^{4/3 + 5/5277}.$$
