Take one year to clear your digital stuff
If you never (or almost) clean your storage this is perfect for you !
Are you lost with all the mess you have ? You don’t remember what you have on your phone, desktop or any other device… Let me tell you what I’ve tried one year ago. There are 4 main categories (or steps) that you can spread by doing one step every 3 months for example.
1) Start with your emails
How much unread mails do you have in your box ? 300? 1000 ? 3000 ? It’s time for you to delete them ! You receive a lot of newsletters you don’t care about… Besides, did you know that your box pollute the world ? Yes, you pollute the world (& your mind). Because when you receive an email or when your mails are stored in a cloud, it consumes a lot of energy. You are using CO2 like when you take your car or a flight.
Cleanfox can help you clean newsletters off your mailbox. Here you are below, a quick preview about the website :)
2) Your phone
Clean your photos, your app or anythings else.
First, let’s begin with your photos, I don’t know for you but personally I take a lot of photos. I’m the kind of person who takes 5 or 6 photos of the same things because I want to be sure to have a good shot and I try to avoid blurry pictures. So, what am I doing in that case ? I’m cleaning my gallery when I have a little of time or if sometimes it’s too hard to choose between similar pictures, I take a step back and come back later to make up my mind and choose 1 or 2 photos maximum.
About souvenir photo, not an easy step but you should keep picture that remind you of something and ideally a feeling of joy. Of course, you can have picture with sad memories, it can be great to see some pictures where you were from and see where you are now. Besides, you can have a lot of photos for an event and I think you should have 3 or 5 pictures that perfectly summarize the event. A smooter way to sort your pictures, you can create a new folder with pictures that you want to delete and delete them later. I could still say a lot about the photos and it’s still something that I’m improving.
Second, you can clean & organize your apps, for example, one page for settings, one page for productivity, one page for social media, social network and games. However, after one year, I decided to have 2 pages on my phone, the first is for basic usage and native apps. The second page is for all stuff. So, try it and find the best way that suits the best for you :).
Third, don’t forget to set up your notifications and more… When you receive a lot of notifications it can be really overwhelming.
3) Your computer
First, delete your trash. When you delete something, your files are not directly deleted, they are actually stored in the trash. You have to empty your bin to definitely delete them. Don’t do like me, I had 80gb on my trash and my memory disk was oversaturated.
Second, you should have nothing on your desktop. After cleaning your trash, you can now focus on cleaning your desktop. You can see below how satisfying it is to have no files on it ! Tell me how you feel looking at your clean desktop :)
Third, clean your downloads folder and try to have nothing in it. When you download a file, store it directly in the right place.
Or a drastic solution to clean your computer is : reset ! Make a backup and restart from 0. This is what I did recently. And please, be sure to save your important files before doing it !
4) Clean your social media
Maybe you have already noticed it since corona say “Hi” to us, but I could notice the effects of social networks on me (years ago) or on all my relatives. So prevention is better than cure.
You should unfollow people that don’t spark joy on you or mute them. Follow people or content that you enjoy. You will see how it’s good to scroll down your feed and only see things that you like. Also, it’s useless to follow a lot of people because it’s impossible to see what everyone post on social media.
In my case, maybe you’ll say I’m crazy and it’s not the better way to do it but I used Google Sheets and I listed everyone that I followed on Insta, I sorted them into different categories. It helped me to have a better vision of what type of content I’m following.
P.S : Choose a background that you love. Maybe it’s a simple advice, but you’ll see the difference, I promise !
I wrote this article one year ago but I’ve never posted it. I made a quick update because I’m sure it can help some of you guys. Don’t hesitate to tell me what about you ! I’m really curious how you organize or anythings else !
