7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life

I have been on the internet for a very long time. I was building my own websites and doing an early form of micro blogging back in the early 2000s while I was in high school. Yea, it’s been a while and with each new iteration of tech, software and internet enabled gadgets, I feel like I have accumulated so much digital clutter. And I don’t think you even had to be active in the digital space for as long as I have been to feel similarly. Most of us have a backlog of emails in our inbox, a camera roll cluttered with photos, videos and screen shots, and just too much digital stuff to look at, scroll through, listen to and watch!

It’s time for us to do a digital declutter- at least, it’s time for me to do a digital declutter.

If you are not familiar with the concept of a digital declutter, it’s very similar to the concept of a home, room, closet or drawer declutter. We are going to go through our digital devices and start clearing things out.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Why is this necessary? Our digital devices are equipped with enough hard drive and cloud backup space to keep every single email, picture, screen shot, app, and note- so why would we actively declutter this if we can just keep it forever?

You’re right, we do have nearly unlimited storage space for all our digital information, however, when was the last time you truly went back and reviewed older files? I know for me, I occasionally scroll through files looking for something I know I saved and because of all the other digital clutter, it’s hard for me to find that one single thing I’m looking for. Even when I use the search function in an app like my email to find something I know I saved, I find it hard to locate that specific email. I’ve frequently lost digital files on my devices, and so, perhaps we give that seemingly unlimited storage capacity and search functionality too much credit. Like physical clutter, digital clutter can absolutely be an eyesore or weight on our shoulders, complicating things that should be an organized convenience. So, if you are ready to lighten your digital load and have an easier time with your devices, here are some ways you can start your own digital declutter.

7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life

#1. Get to Email Inbox Zero: I’ve created an entire video on the exact process I use to get to Email Inbox Zero, so click here to check it out. No, Inbox Zero doesn’t mean we are going to delete all of our emails. Instead we are going to use a system of organizing to process through unread emails and properly store or delete emails as necessary to ensure our inboxes are as organized as possible and that no email is left behind.

#2. Unsubscribe from Email Lists You No Longer Enjoy: While you are completing your Email Inbox Zero project, I know you’ll find emails from subscription lists you no longer enjoy. So to cut down on future email clutter, let’s just take a minute, before deleting those old emails, to locate and use the unsubscribe function to prevent future necessary email clutter.

#3. Delete Unused Apps On Your Devices: As I am completely integrated into the Apple ecosystem, whenever I get a new device, like a new iPhone for instance, it automatically downloads all the apps from every other device I own. Ugh! This is such a pain because I use certain apps on my iPad and not on my iPhone, and I end up with pages of apps I need to organize or remove. Let’s save ourselves the hassle and just purge all the old apps we no longer use. So check your phone, tablet and even your computer for old apps or software you can remove to save space and processing power for other things.

#4. Review and Clean Up the Pictures, Videos and Screenshots on Your Phone: The photo albums on my phone are a particularly cluttered part of my life. I take so many photos, videos and screenshots and very rarely delete any of them. So, if you are like me, I recommend you first take a moment to back up your photos from your phone to either your computer or to a cloud storage system. I have a Dropbox Pro membership so I can set my photos to back up to the cloud there just to ensure I don’t loose anything important. Then once everything is safe, I will go through my photos/camera roll and just clear out anything that doesn’t need to be on my phone.

#5. Create a Digital Filing System on Your Computer: Now, this happens to be one the few areas of my digital life that I do have pretty well organized already, but I know so many people have a computer desktop covered with files and no clear system for storing information to future reference. For me, my system begins with folders in my “Documents” folder of my Mac. In there I have sub folders for different areas of my life and of course a dedicated folder for my business. It’s not just on folder, of course, but I keep folders nested inside each other for different aspects of my business in a file system that makes logical sense to me, so I always know where I need to store specific files and where to find them when I need to reference them again. My in progress files go in a dedicated folder called “In Progress” and I try to declutter this folder on a somewhat monthly basis. Although I always try to ensure I am saving photos, documents and other files to their appropriate place in my filing system, sometimes when I have a number of items I need to reference for a project, it’s easier to just leave them in one folder and put everything “away” once the work is complete. Whatever system makes sense to you, put something in place where you can properly organize the files on your computer, because again, search doesn’t always work out, especially if you name a file something random, forget to change the name on a file that might have had a generic title or if you misspell your file name as I sometimes do and then loose things in plain sight. At least when files are in their proper place in my system, I can narrow down where I need to look for them!

#6. Scrub through Your Podcast Subscriptions and Replace some Old Shows with some New Ones: I don’t know about you, but when it comes to free platforms like podcasts, I tend to go overboard subscribing to all different types of shows I might be interested in. In truth, however, there are few I follow through with listening to. So, it’s a great idea to review my podcast subscriptions and make sure I take off any shows I thought I’d want to listen to but didn’t like or never got around to while my interest was high. The thing about podcasts, especially if you use a podcast app like the one that comes standard on your iPhone, is that the episodes technically download to your device so they do take up storage space. If you don’t listen to a show for a while, the episodes stop downloading automatically, but if you are subscribed to a lot of shows that can be a big chunk of your hard drive taken up. So, review the podcasts you’re subscribed to, remove subscriptions to shows you don’t like, and perhaps even unearth a new show or two that piques your interest.

#7. Unfollow Instagram Accounts that No Longer Inspire You and Find a few New Ones that Light You Up: One of the aspects of the digital declutter I didn’t even touch on yet is how having soo much content at your fingertips can sometimes overwhelm you in a negative way. Specifically, when it comes to social media platforms like Instagram (but feel free to replace IG with any platform like Twitter, Facebook, YouTub, TikTok, etc) we might start following people or accounts for certain inspirational content, but then after a while it becomes a game of comparison to us. If you aren’t looking to your social content feeds feeling uplifted and inspired, and instead feel judgey, overwhelmed or brought down by what you see, it’s time to purge your feed. Remove, unfollow or unsubscribe from feeds that bring you down, and replace some of them with new content to lift you up.

So, those were 7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life. I’d love to hear what you thought of these ideas and how things go for you as you start your digital declutter process. To make this process even more methodical, if that’s something you’d enjoy, perhaps consider turning this into a 7 day challenge for yourself and performing one of the activities per day for a week. Let me know how it goes!

xoxo,