10 Ways to Spring Clean Your Digital Life
Consider adding a digital declutter to your 2023 spring cleaning. A digital declutter creates a tidy and organized digital, or online, space that can support your wellbeing and productivity. Decluttering digitally is clearing out your computer, phone, tablet and internet or cloud-based applications and accounts. Here are ten ideas to get started with a digital declutter as part of your 2023 spring cleaning.
1. Clean Your Desktop
Your desktop is probably the first and last thing you see each working days. Take the time to time get your home base looking and working its best. A clean desktop gives you a clean working space that isn’t fragmented or distracting.
Avoid storing floating documents, downloads, or screenshots on your desktop. Consider adding a nightly or weekly cleanup to your routine if you have this tendency. A clean screen will help you feel and appear more organized. You probably know which of your coworkers and vendors allow their desktops to become a graveyard for downloads from times they’ve shared their screens.
Set a background that creates the right atmosphere for the time you spend at your computer. Recently, I’ve setup different backgrounds on my laptop and my monitor- this gives me two different views from my desk, with a more generic background used to when screen sharing at work.
2. Organize Your Documents
Keep your documents and photos organized by storing them in folders that make sense for you and workflow. If you don’t have a consistent naming convention or systemization, think about how you can use these digital tools to your advantage. Organizing documents and photos in folders with naming conventions that are consistent and make sense, will make documents easy to find and improve your workflow. If you know where a document is and what its called your less likely to download or duplicate documents you already have saved somewhere else. Having an organization system will help you to keep your desktop clean because you know where different documents should belong or make sense.
3. Delete Unused, or Unnecessary, Apps
Clear your phone and tablet of apps you no longer use, or would like to avoid using. You’ve likely downloaded more than a few apps over the years that no longer serve you. Are you still playing candy crush? Do you use all three of your weather and map apps? Delete them. Are there any apps that you find stealing your time or emotional capacity? Delete them. If it isn’t serving you, making your life easier or better, delete it.
4. Close Browser Tabs
Did you know your iPhone’s Safari app only lets you have 500 tabs open? I learned this after I maxed out my open tabs and wasn’t able to open my 501st. Close any open tabs that you won’t really go back to read. If you cannot remember that it’s open, you don’t need it.
5. Clear Your Inbox
Take the time to go through your inbox(es) and clear out what you can. Take the time to read, archive, organize, or delete old and unread emails. If your inbox has become unmanageable, search senders you know you can delete messages from and do a batch delete (ex. The newsletters you never read or wanted to come back to or marketing emails from stores you frequent).
6. Click Unsubscribe
While you’re in you’re clearing out your inbox take the time to unsubscribe from all the marketing emails inundating your inbox. Start moving unwanted marketing and junk emails to your junk folder and unsubscribing from them as soon as they hit your inbox.
7. Schedule Your Time to Focus
Set yourself up by scheduling time that’s for focus, time that’s away from work, and consider including time that is away from screens and technology. Most phones, computer software, and browers help you do this by limiting what notifications you can get during specific times of the day. Many phones will even block you from accessing many of your apps at night to break the doom scroll habit.
8. Review and Remove Duplicate Unnecessary Photos and Contacts
Many of us have old screenshots, duplicate photos, and unnecessary photos on our devices. These can make finding important photos harder and are taking up unnecessary storage in the cloud and our minds. Delete things that are completely unnecessary. Review your contacts for duplicates, people listed separately for their email and phone number or- for those old enough, separate home and cell phone numbers. You may even have some contacts in your phone that you can’t remember and could delete all together.
9. Secure Your Accounts & Passwords
This may be one of the most important. Secure passwords may not bog you down in the moment but if you get locked out of accounts, or worse, have accounts hacked and personal data breaches you will have a headache you could have avoided. There were days we used the same passwords on repeat, then maybe you started to add a capital letter, a number, or a character. Those days are over. Take your cyber security seriously by using strong, unique passwords, resetting them regularly, and not storing them where they can be seen or hacked themselves. Data breaches and security concerns are all-too-common, be proactive, responsible and diligent with your online presence and security.
If you don’t already have a password keeper here are a few to consider: Dashlane, 1Password, Keeper, or NordPass.
10. Clean Your Devices
This one is less about cleaning what is stored digitally and more about cleaning how you see it. Clean your screens, change cracked cases and covers, and clean your keyboards. We use our devices so often and rarely give them the care we should. Wiping your screens, with safe products, and replacing cracked screen protectors or screens changes how everything we do on them appears. You probably wipe your desk off so you aren’t working in dust and crumbs- try using a compressed air duster to clean out your computer keyboard too.
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