How to Do A Digital Declutter in 5 Easy Steps

Originally published on August 4, 2020 | Last updated on February 10, 2024

When we hear about decluttering, it tends to be focused on physical items such as clothes and books. But, have you ever considered cleaning out your digital life? Just like physical clutter, digital clutter becomes a problem when you can’t find the things you need and start feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, there are ways to simplify your digital life. In today’s post, I’m showing you how to do a digital declutter in 5 easy steps:

1. Clean up Your Inbox

It’s so important to keep your inbox organised. If you don’t maintain it and allow your emails to get out of control, you’ll be left feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Not to mention, unproductive. You should always try your best to keep your inbox at zero. A great way I like to achieve this is by sorting my emails into folders, so they are taken out of the primary inbox. Doing this will enable you to go through each topic at a time. If you use Gmail, you can set up your inbox to automatically sort your emails into folders as soon as they arrive — which is very handy.

2. Tidy Up Your Documents

If you can never find any of the documents you’re looking for, it’s time to tidy up the folders on your computer. Before you do anything, you need to go through all of your documents and delete any you no longer need. When I did a recent digital declutter, I found that due to the large amount of files I had to sort through, doing a little at a time was a lot more manageable. Once you know which documents you’re going to keep, place any that are just floating around into folders. This will make your life so much easier as you’ll know exactly where everything is. When it comes to storing your files, you’ll need to find a solution that works best for you — whether that’s cloud storage or an external hard drive.

3. Organise Your Photos

Images and videos take up a huge amount of space, so it’s a good idea to stay on top of them. Go through them, deleting any duplicates, blurry images or ones you simply don’t want to keep anymore. Next, organise your photos into folders and sort them by date or event. To store your photos, try saving them on a cloud drive so that you don’t use up all of the space on your phone or computer. I recommend using DropBox or OneDrive. You could always go non-digital and create a photo album to store some of your photos! I think there’s something lovely about flipping through a photo album and reminiscing about good times.

4. Streamline Your Social Media

Social media is definitely one of many people’s biggest distractions. It’s so easy to waste your time scrolling on a never-ending newsfeed. To start off, delete any people, pages or groups that you no longer want to follow. Doing this means that you only keep the stuff that matters on your newsfeed and as a result, you’ll spend less time on the site. If you feel uncomfortable “unfriending” someone, then you can always “mute” them instead. Remember, you get to choose the content you want to consume. Once I did this myself, I found that I was on social media a lot less.

5. Manage Your Apps

We’ve all been guilty of downloading too many apps and not using many of them. Go through the apps on your phone and delete any that have no value to you. If there’s an app that you haven’t opened in six months, then you most likely have no need for it. Do you have an app that you waste way too much time on? Maybe it’s time to get rid of it. Doing this will free up so much space on your phone and improve its performance. I also recommend turning push notifications off as they can become a huge distraction!

So that’s my best tips and tricks on how to do a digital declutter. What are you doing to declutter your digital life? I’d be interested to know!

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