Digital Declutter

About a month ago, I decided a decluttering and general life simplification was in order.  I found myself having to trudge through STUFF to get anything done.  I felt weighed down, inefficient, and buried in junk.  It was time to make a change.

I started with my clothes.  Brutally, I assessed each garment’s worthiness to hold real estate in my closet.  I built a Project 333 capsule wardrobe and stored seasonal items out of my way.  

Then I dug a little deeper and culled some distractions and habits that were not enhancing my life, increasing my productivity, or bringing me joy.  You can read about it here.

My next project took much longer.  Digital declutter!  I’m talking computer files, email labels, photos, and subscriptions.  The victory won here is the ease with which I can move about my digital world; no more racking my brain trying (in vain) to remember what I’ve named a file so I can find it.  Let me walk you through what I’ve done…

Email: Labels, filters, and Subscriptions

The first thing I did was clean up my Gmail.  I had labels galore and was saving almost every email that dropped into my box!  I generalized my labeling system and deleted a megaton of unnecessary archived data so that using the search function would be easier and more productive.  From there I started unsubscribing from everything I didn’t need.  

The difficulty I had with unsubscribing came when, though I had hit the “unsubscribe” button and filled out whatever online form was needed, certain solicitors continued to spam me!  That was when I started to employ the filter function.  I simply create a filter that automatically deletes correspondence from a certain sender or email address.  Boom!  Clean inbox.

Photos

I was never one of those girls who took thousands of pictures of everything.  Mostly, I try to enjoy everything in the moment, but how do you keep from capturing every facial expression, every milestone, and every outfit change when you have a beautiful baby?  With the birth of Alice, I turned into a photo freak!  My iCloud quickly filled and my data was unable to back up.  That’s when I discovered the album creator in iPhoto on my Macbook Air.  I was able to choose my favorite photos and arrange them into an album, which I can order on the cheap.  I trashed the unused images and plan to order my first album soon.

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to stop taking pictures, so I worried that my iCloud would fill right back up again.  To prevent this, I turned off syncing on my phone.  That way I can choose which photos are good enough to back up, protecting my Cloud from clutter.

Text messages

iPhones store all text correspondence until you delete it or until you run out of memory.  When I finally got around to going through my texts, I had over a year’s worth.  Before deleting a thread, I checked it for important information like addresses of friends and family, which I saved elsewhere.  It’s amazing how much faster my phone runs without the unneeded junk!

Downloads and Trash

It’s easy to end up with a gazillion documents in your Downloads and Trash files on your computer.  I try to go in every Friday and clear them out to keep my machine empty of unnecessary, slowing clutter.

More work to do

I haven’t completed all I wanted to yet.  I still haven’t gone through my old Toshiba to see what I want to keep and what I no longer need.  When I do, I’ll upload all files to Google Drive, instead of filling up the hard drive of my new computer.

I guess that’s about it.  It’s amazing how quickly digital clutter can pile up!  What do you do to keep it at bay?