9 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life

Your inbox is overflowing, you have apps you don’t use and your desktop’s a mess.

You’re suffering from digital overload.

Why not use these dreary winter nights to clean up your act? By doing so, there will be less distraction and you may even find yourself more productive. Just like physical clutter in our homes, digital clutter makes it harder to find things when you really need them. For a lot of us, it will apply both at work, home and on our cellphones so be patient – it may take some time but be worth it in the end.

1. Clean up your desktop – We bet you have a desktop covered with random files and pictures. Drag as many as possible to the recycle bin and do it on a regular basis. This way it will be easier to spot the files you do use.
2. Unsubscribe from e-newsletters you don’t read –Remember when you signed up for an e-newsletter because you could get an additional discount on something you were buying? Or, you were actually interested in the content and would read it when you had time? Unsubscribe from those you don’t find of interest or value anymore. The end result? Less stuff bombarding your inbox in the future and less to clean out.
3. Clear out your inbox –This is a biggie and it usually gets away from most of us. You want to separate the emails you need from the ones you don’t. Create folders for the important items, for example, insurance or travel. If you’re able to group everything by sender, you can bulk delete or archive emails from specific senders all at once to save time.
4. Declutter documents – Like cleaning your closet, it’s time to decide what to keep and what can go. Old project, notes, duplicates or something you kept just in case but never looked at – it’s time to say goodbye for good. Organize what’s left into folders and on your hard drive or store it in the cloud. If you need help, there are programs that will help clean your hard drive for you.
5. Purge the pictures –You know those pictures of your feet or a selfie gone bad? Get rid of them. Pictures and videos are true space hogs. Organize the photos you want to keep in folders and store them in the cloud. That way, if something should ever happen to your actual computer, you haven’t lost those images.
6. Pare down your social media -If you don’t care about a lot of things you see in your newsfeed, then it’s time to act. You can un-friend on Facebook, go through your friend’s list and like pages or unfollow. The main thing to keep in mind is you want to see what you’re interested in. You can also unfollow people on Twitter and Instagram as well as mute people in your Twitter feed.
7. Slim down your apps – How many don’t you use any longer? Delete, delete, delete. And while you’re at it turn off all non-essential notifications on the apps on your smartphone.
8. Delete contents in your downloads folder – Get rid of whatever you don’t need because it takes up valuable hard drive space. It could actually help speed up your system.

Organize monthly – By cleaning up on a regular basis you’ll be on the road to living the simple digital life!