Why You Need to Get Rid of Digital Clutter

Digital clutter is a real thing these days. I mean if it wasn’t bad enough that some people struggle with paper stacks at work and at home, piles of clothing, and an obscene number of books that most of us will never even read again, we now have digital clutter to worry about. Technology seems to have been designed to organize and streamline many things. But if you aren’t careful, you’ll end up having more clutter to deal with anyways.

So why do you need to get rid of digital clutter? Well, because you’re just aggravating yourself more when you deal with it. Clutter in any form can add stress and anxiety to your life and it can make it harder to find things. You may even spend more money than you need to because you can’t find things you already have so you have to go get more. So when it comes to digital clutter, you may end up having to purchase more cloud storage space because you automatically save every single photo without weeding through. You may have drama on your social media feeds because you need to declutter your timeline and friends list. Your email inbox may be stuffed with spam because you are too overwhelmed to even start trying to unsubscribe so it’s hard for you to notice the important bills and other emails.

So how do you get rid of digital clutter? Well, here’s a few ways.

Purge Photos

I backup my photos on my phone to a cloud service. But if I saved every photo to the cloud I’d have no room because I take a lot of accidental blurry photos. So my process is that at the end of every day or sometimes every week, I go through my photos in my phone. I upload the ones I want on social media, I delete the blurry ones, and then I push them to the cloud. Once they’ve been backed up to the cloud I delete them to free up space on my phone. Sometimes I keep a few good ones.

Clean Email Up

I have a separate folder in my inbox for newsletters. I am picky with the ones I choose to subscribe too. Each week I go through and unsubscribe from things I put in my deleted folder. When I address an email or handle it, it goes to a different folder. The only emails sitting in my inbox are things that I need to address or deal with soon. I do this for my work email as well.

Minimize Your Friend List

Go through your social media friends and unfollow or delete anyone you don’t know, don’t truly enjoy, or anyone that has posts that do nothing but aggravate you. It will make your timeline full of WAYYYYYYY better things and you don’t need to worry about creepy strangers having access to your stuff. Be cautious of who you blindly accept and think twice about what you post.

Phone Apps

I regularly delete any apps I no longer need and I organize the ones I do use into groupings by topic like social media, local apps, photo apps, etc. Doing this makes it easier to find an app. I also go through each app’s settings one by one and I remove notifications unless it’s something I actually want a notification showing up for. For that, it’s only Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, and my work email app. I don’t use notifications on anything else because I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Delete and Organize Computer Files

Remember to back up your computer but before doing so, get rid of old files you don’t need to keep. The ones you do keep, organize into folders so you can easily find what you’re looking for. Do the same for your photos saved to your computer. Treat them like you would if they were physical photos going into an album.

Digitally decluttering your life is just as important as the physical decluttering we do. What are the ways you declutter your digital life?

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