Your Digital Declutter Guide

You take a deep breath and let it out in a rush. You’ve just opened your email and see that you have 1,234 unread emails. You open a folder in your File Explorer and look for something you know you saved, but you can’t remember what it’s called or when you wrote it.  Frustrated, you close the File Explorer and everything else and look at your desktop. Oh snap, it doesn’t look any better, there are files and folders all over the place. It used to be a great place to keep stuff you’d need quickly, but now…

Your phone doesn’t look any better. You’ve got your apps spread all over the place and your photos are taking up so much space you have to delete one every time you want to take a new one. You’re ready to throw all your devices in the trash and go back to pencil and paper for everything. Wasn’t all this technology supposed to make life easier? This is so stressful, it’s getting to be not worth the trouble!

Clutter in our devices has the same effect on us as physical clutter in our living and working spaces. It can affect our mental clarity, our efficiency, our security, and our mood. You know that feeling after you do a huge clean-out of a room in your house that has gotten out of hand? You’ll feel that same way when you do a digital declutter. It’s not hard to do, but it can be time consuming, just like a physical declutter can. However, there’s a difference between being able to physically pick something up and decide if it has outlived its usefulness and looking at digital objects and making the same call. I’m here to help! I’ll help you not only make a plan for a declutter, but also to put things in place that will make it easier to find, use, and dispose of digital files in the future.

Understanding Digital Clutter

Digital clutter (I’ve also heard it called “digital cockroaches”) are all the files that we accumulate over time that have outlived their usefulness. I don’t consider useful files to be “clutter,” any more than I consider useful physical objects to be “clutter,” but the title “clutter” comes into play when we took at the group of objects and can’t really tell at a glance what’s useful and what’s not. What’s useful is the documents you need or realistically might need: pay stubs for the current year, tax documents for the past several years, vital documents, emails about upcoming events, family communication, and photos that you love. What’s not important is duplicates of files, email newsletters from which you derive no value, calendar notifications if you don’t find them useful, and financial records that have exceeded their useful lifespan, like your bank statements from six years ago (guilty!).

How did we get to this place? Well, let’s start with email: most people don’t live in their email the way I do. My husband doesn’t even look at his personal email every day. It’s also likely that the worse it gets, the less you look forward to opening the program. Don’t worry, we’ll get you through it. There are also not only duplicated files, but there are going to be a lot of files that have outlived their usefulness. You’re probably never going to use most of what you created six years ago. I like to use the age range “six years,” but not for any particular good reason.  You’ll also have applications you haven’t used in a long time, and there will be photos that there is no good reason to keep – so out of focus you can’t figure out what it is, something you took a picture of to remember something about it that is no longer relevant. If you don’t take care of them periodically, and if you don’t have a system to handle incoming stuff in an organized way, you’ll end up with files all over that you can’t find, don’t need, and can’t identify.

The Benefits of Decluttering Your Digital Life

Have you ever gone looking for something and it was exactly where you expected it to be? What a great feeling!  What a rare feeling! We waste a lot of time looking for things. We start out with great intentions, but the more things that exist in any place, the longer it will take to find something in that place. Conversely, the fewer things that live there, the less time it will take to find what you’re looking for. Also, getting rid of all the cruft clears space on your device. If your phone, tablet, or computer’s main drive gets full, it’ll quit working, and we don’t want that. You also need to get rid of old files for the same reason you shouldn’t leave vital documents lying around: if someone sees them, they can use the information they see.

How to Start Decluttering

Files

So how do we get started? How do we eat an elephant? One bite at a time. We’re going to get started one byte at a time (yes, that’s a terrible joke). Let’s start by looking at the list of files you have in your Documents folder. Can you see obvious categories? Start by making folders and sorting the files into the folders. You’ll probably have some that need to stay out in the Documents main folder because there aren’t enough of them to sort into folders, and that’s fine. Try to use the same naming method for your folders. For home use, you’ll probably just use topic names. But for my business, I do a better job of naming them. It’s a small, privately-owned business, so those files exist on my personal device, but with a separate naming convention. Sometimes if I’m working on a project and I know I want to keep that folder where I can find it easily, I’ll add a “00_” to the front of the folder name so it will be at the top of the list of folders.

Now that you have them sorted, you can take one folder at a time and look through them. At the top of the list of files, click on Date Modified. That’s the last date you made a change to it. Start with the oldest Date Modified, and the files that you know you’re done with, you can delete. Scared to hit that “Delete” button? How about this: Create a folder on your desktop that’s called “Scared to Delete.” Move those files into that. Not COPY – MOVE. Normally I don’t like to move items, unless they’re “throwaway” files or files I can easily go get again. But if you’re pretty sure you’re done with it, but you’re not 100% sure, move it to that folder.

If you have a lot of files to go through, you’re not going to get it all done today. It’s a lot easier to do a few at a time. Create a recurring calendar appointment for a time of the week when you’re relaxed and don’t have something important to do in an hour, and just spend half an hour going through a folder. Your desktop – did you know that’s a folder? It is. Look over here, see that Desktop folder?

Click on the folder. Now you can see all those files on your desktop. Do they all really need to be there? Could they live in your Documents folder system? There are also probably a lot of software shortcuts on your desktop, because software developers believe that their software is important enough that you’re going to want to use it all the time, so you need a shortcut. You probably don’t. If you don’t use it quite often, right-click and select Delete. You’re only deleting the shortcut, not the program. That’s not true of files – when you delete the file, you’re deleting the file.

How old is too old to keep? It’s so tempting to keep records that you’ve heard you’ll get in trouble for not having. Here’s the thing: Once you’ve paid a bill and the transaction has cleared your financial institution, you don’t need to keep the bill. If you do keep them, have a plan to store them so you can find them easily (each company in its own folder and year) and a plan to get rid of them. For example, AT&T phone 2022; AT&T internet 2022; AT&T phone 2023, etc. I keep this year’s and last year’s, and I delete everything beyond last year. Yes, even bank statements. The exception is tax records. I keep those for seven years. The Internal Revenue Service has copies of your tax records beyond that, and I found that out when I was applying for a job that required ten years of income verification. By all means, keep what you know you absolutely must keep, and get rid of things you’re flabbergasted that you kept.

Email

Oh, email. Yes, let’s tackle this. Those messages are taking up space somewhere, and eventually there will be repercussions. Some email providers will stop sending messages if you hit the size limit of the mailbox. This is another task that you don’t have to do all at once, and it’ll be better if you do it in chunks. Sort your incoming email by Sender first. This will give you an idea of who is sending you email you need and who is sending you email you don’t want. Find one sender that is sending you ads that you don’t find value in, open one email, go to the bottom, hit Unsubscribe. A browser window will open with instructions to unsubscribe. It may take a couple of days, but eventually you’ll stop getting their mail. Once you’ve unsubscribed, you can delete ALL the messages from that sender. BOOM! You’ve just significantly reduced the size of your Inbox. So that takes care of ads. You probably still have a lot of messages to deal with. Still sorted by sender’s name, you can figure out who you want to hear from. But do you need to read those items NOW? Can you put them in a place to deal with them later? You can create folders in your email account that will let you move messages out of your Inbox. They still count toward the total space that your mailbox takes up, but it’ll at least be easier to see what you still have to deal with.

Here’s another tool to help you deal with your incoming messages: filters and rules. Some providers call them filters, Outlook calls them rules. You set up the program to direct certain types of messages to go to certain folders. For example, When I receive a message from Joe’s Dust For Less, send it to the folder “Read It Later.” I recommend that you don’t send anything directly to trash using a rule. If you don’t want to receive it, unsubscribe.

There’s a concept called Inbox Zero, which means that at the end of the day, you have nothing in your Inbox. You’ve taken care of everything in some way – unsubscribed/deleted, acted on it, moved it to storage, something. I’ve never achieved Inbox Zero. I’m guilty of sort of using my inbox as a to-do list. But if you want to try Inbox Zero after you do a major cleanup, go for it.

Apps

Phones and Tablets: somewhere in the Settings portion, you should find a list of the apps you have installed. You can scroll down the list and remember all the ones you forgot you installed. How many of those can you get rid of? You can also create folders to group them. I have all my apps on one screen in different folders. Now, it is true that my front screen as absolutely full of folders, but I don’t have to scroll through six screens to find the app I want. I go through once a year, as part of my New Year’s Eve festivities, and get rid of anything I can’t remember using over the past year.

You should clean out your computer of unused programs as well, because they don’t always get updates for security problems, and if you don’t open them, there may not be any way for it to be patched. And it can still present vulnerability problems even if you’re not opening it. In the search bar on your computer, type Control Panel. Then look for Programs and Features. If yours says Add and Remove Programs, stop and get a newer computer. If that’s what you’re seeing, your computer is no longer getting updates and needs to be replaced. Now, moving on… you can look at the list of programs and see what you recognize. Don’t just remove something because you don’t recognize it, because some of the programs that you DO recognize are dependent on some of the programs that you DON’T recognize. When you remove one you DO recognize, it will grab all its dependents and take them out the door with it. You can sort by date, but I don’t always find that to be useful, I just keep it sorted alphabetically. And keep them updated, whether on your computer, or a phone.

Maintaining a Clutter-Free Digital Environment

I have a running list of regular things to do, some of my rotating tasks include cleaning out my file system. As I said, some of this is New Year’s Eve, some is more often than that. As you get accustomed to doing it, you’ll get a feel for how often I need to do it. Pay attention to what you download and subscribe to, so that you don’t end up in the same place. You don’t need any special tools to do this, just a few minutes every so often and being alert to what you’re receiving and what you’re doing with it. Give yourself some grace if it’s not all perfectly organized in your first go-round. Keep at it periodically and you’ll get closer to your ideal every time.

Now Enjoy Your Clean Device

It’ll be so nice to be able to find what you need without having to dig through things you don’t need. You’ll be much less stressed working on the files you can easily find. Go ahead and get started today, and set an appointment with yourself to make the next pass at it. Drop a comment below with any questions or concerns you have, or come back and let me know how it’s going or how it went!