Digital Decluttering

Many know I’m a big fan of Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant and author of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying. (If you’re looking to tidy, this little gem is both instructional and inspirational – a must read.)

I’ve cleared out my closets, bookshelves, and knickknacks, keeping only things that Spark Joy. It’s liberating and energizing to declutter your space!

But, there’s a new type of clutter in town. It’s been very slowly haunting me and bogging me down as the years pass – it’s digital clutter.

Digital clutter is insidious because it’s out of sight (sort of). It doesn’t take up physical space like boxes of holiday decorations in your garage, but it’s accumulating at an alarming speed.

Today, in place of paying for self-storage units, we pay for cloud storage. Rather than dusting off old photo albums, we scroll through endless photos libraries. In lieu of stuffed mailboxes, we now have stuffed email inboxes.

The great feature of digital is, it takes far less physical space and if the data is well organized, you can find things relatively easily. However, as a recovering data hoarder, I can tell you the “less is more” philosophy still applies to the digital world.

Decluttering and organizing your data has the same perks as decluttering and organizing your physical space. You find what you need quickly, stay focused on what’s important and save money on storage.

Stop the bleeding

Before being able to wrangle-in the digital clutter, first you must stop the bleeding. Vigilantly manage the amount of data is coming in – via your devices, apps, cameras, email, social media and so on.

Start with one category

The best way to get started on managing your digital space is to begin with just one category of data. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, so keep it simple and focused by choosing one area. If possible, break it down even further to small, manageable bites (no pun intended).

Categories (choose one)

1. Email. Email feels like a river of information coming at you while you try and keep your head above water. For the purpose of decluttering your email, the two most powerful actions are to delete non-essential email and unsubscribe from newsletters that no longer serve you (stop the bleeding).
2. Photos. This category is a beast, especially if you have cute kids or in my case, adorable cats. The quick and dirty method of keeping photos manageable is to delete most of your photos immediately. Commit to only keeping the one photo you’d love to put up on your wall from any batch of pics. Delete the rest of the duplicates and all photos with bad lighting, focus, or generally not flattering on the spot.
3. Downloads. This folder in your computer gets jam-packed often without you noticing. Clean out your downloads folder regularly. Rename and save the important documents to your storage space (see naming convention below) or delete, delete, delete.
4. Documents. The first step is to keep what you really need. Second to that, the most important strategy is to have a strong naming convention. This allows you to easily pull-up what you need using search functions. No more complicated folder-in-folder systems.
   1. My favorite naming convention is: vendor-type-name-year.month.date.
      1. Example: Highline Vet Receipt Umi 2018.08.15
      2. Example: Staples Receipt CWC 2018.10.12

There are many more categories such as notes, contacts, apps, music and so on, but these are a great start. You can bet digital content to keep flowing in, so by taking a few minutes to set up your systems will save you time, headache and money in the long run. Clearing out your digital clutter and easily finding what you need is truly magic.