Guide: Digital Decluttering
Top Tips on how to Declutter your Digital Spaces
Decluttering the spaces surrounding you doesn’t stop in your physical space. Your digital world probably needs some decluttering too! Today we are sharing our top tips on how to cleanse those spaces, such as your phone, computer and email, and help rid you of that overwhelming feeling when getting on one of your devices. Chances are, you might not even be noticing how much it is overwhelming you, try our tips and see!
FOR YOUR PHONE
Apps
One of the easiest steps to clear your phone out is to regularly delete apps that you’re no longer using. We all use our phones for so many different aspects of life like banking, social media, babysitting apps, or even scheduling workouts! By providing yourself the space to keep only the apps you are truly using, this actually provides mental clarity by decreasing clutter and stimuli!
Once you have chosen the apps you want to keep, sort apps into folders by category! I like to use Social Media, Banking, Directions, Travel, Chatting, Photos, Shopping, Eating, etc.
A member on our team recommended the app called TrueBill to make sure you aren’t paying for any subscriptions services that were forgotten about! Love that idea.
Social Media: Unfollow accounts that bum you out or remove yourself from FB groups that you are no longer engaged in so that you receive less notifications.
Photos
At the end of every month, review your recent photos and delete any you don't need, and put similar ones into albums (example: family trip to malibu, Lincoln's virtual graduation, etc.)
Contacts
It is important to keep your contacts updated and clutter-free as well. Why have someone’s address in there from high school or college? Incorporate changes like address, last names, add notes about family members names. Make those updates and purge any contacts you no longer need.
FOR YOUR COMPUTER
No one wants tons and tons of emails from random companies. A great tool to use is unroll.me. It will auto-unsubscribe from unwanted emails and also you can choose some to “roll up” like websites that send coupons, and it will consolidate them to one email a day for you!
File read emails into folders so they're out of your inbox. I use categories like: Family, Medical, Friends, Receipts, Travel. This way you still have all the emails accessible, but you're not always looking at them when you don't need them. If folders aren’t really your thing and you won’t need those emails often, you can also archive them so that you can search them if you need them, but they aren’t in your inbox.
This is also a good time to go back and delete any old accounts that you don’t use or serve their purpose anymore, like AOL or hotmail. You can even go into them, forward anything crucial to your most used email for safe keeping and then delete them!
Some people like to create a junk email instead of using services like Unfold.me. What this means is it is an email account that you specifically use to sign up for coupons, political party emails, etc. That way you can read them when you want to and they aren’t cluttering your important incoming mail. You might want to use one of your old emails for this too.
Desktop
Keep it clear! It is best to not save to your desktop and use folders for everything. Try to keep all file names consistent (capitalization etc) and delete old drafts.
Periodically go through and do a deep clean to rid of any documents, images or applications that you don’t need.