Twelve Ways To Deal With Your Digital Clutter In Five Minutes A Day

A lot of us have digital clutter and often we turn a blind eye to it as it’s ‘hidden’ away on a computer or on our phone. This type of clutter can still create just as much stress for us as we can’t get our hands on a document or photo when we need it. At work, it can create a lot of overwhelm when we look in our inbox, desktop or online document folders.

Sources of Digital Clutter

Digital clutter can come in the form of:

• Emails
• Documents
• Photos
• Apps
• Note apps
• Contacts and ‘Liked’ pages on social media

So how can you get started on decluttering your digital world? Here’s twelve ways you could get started.

Management strategies

Choose one of the above categories and spend 5 minutes doing one of the below challenges:

1. Delete the emails, files, photos or apps you don’t use or want.
2. Choose a folder of documents to work through and rename any files or folders properly.
3. Filing (moving) files and photos into folders for an easy find. This will need you to think of the groups you’d like to keep them in. Take a look at your IPad, PC or laptop ‘desktop’ or a folder to start on.
4. Emails – Work through your inbox. If you want to keep them as an email, create folders to support this, or file them as needed. You can also try these challenges and tips.
   • How To Keep Your Inbox Under Control
   • Four Ideas To Get Through Your Dreaded Inbox
   • Digital Clutter: Reignite Your Soul
   • Overcome Your Inbox Overwhelm With These Simple Tips
5. Photos – Choose a bunch of digital photos to work through. Create a folder called ‘The Gems’ and move across the ones you love immediately. Alternatively, get a pen and paper, and quickly view your photos. Write down the names of the ones you love. Select and move these into ‘The Gems’ folder. Delete the rest.
6. Focus on one of your Note Apps. Time to consolidate your notes and To-Do List. Choose one App to focus on. Delete To Do’s that are completed, or no longer relevant. If this is the App you intend to keep using, great. If not, write down the to do’s and notes that will get moved into your preferred App and add them in.
7. Work through the Icons on your phone. Delete Apps you no longer use. Better still, change the notifications on the ones you do use to something less distracting.
8. Work through your Apps and group similar Apps together. For instance, finance-related ones, Maps and GPS ones, Social Media ones, health-related ones and so on. This will help you find what you want.
9. Spend some time working with the Icons on your phone. Make sure the Apps you use most often are on the first screen. Followed by the ones you use often and then further screens with the ones you use only occasionally.
10. Emails with an action. Work through your emails and make a note for your To-Do List, of any actions you need to follow up. Delete out these emails. You can ‘search’ for it later if you want to reply back to it, or simply start a new email.
11. Working through the contacts on one of your social media pages. Remove people you don’t know, like or want to follow anymore.
12. Work through pages and groups liked on your Facebook page and unlike and remove any companies and groups you don’t engage with anymore.

Still overwhelmed with digital clutter? Get in touch with WellSorted to help you through it.