With Spring finally upon us, it’s common to do a little yard or house cleaning to prepare for the summer months but what about your digital life? Often times we forget that we need to reorganize our digital lives at least once a year and what better time than Spring to do that. Not sure where to start? Well we’ve got you covered.
Clean Up Your Desktop
Your desktop is likely the one place where you spend the most time digitally. And let’s be honest, most of us use it as our digital dumping ground. To help avoid this becoming a hard to navigate wasteland, take the time to go through your miscellaneous files and place them in the appropriate file.
Take special caution with files you think your team might need access to if you are ever out of the office and place those in a public folder. Also make sure to keep both the original/editable file and the final file in the same place to keep things streamlined.
Clean Up Your Emails
We’ve heard of the mystical “zero inbox” and while we all have one friend who swears they’ve mastered it, many of us are still skeptical of it. Whether you’re headed in that directly or are just trying to get a more organized mailbox, here are some tips to start. First start by cleaning up all your email subscriptions. Unroll.me is a great resources for this as it makes it simple to unsubscribe to things that are just taking up space.
The next thing to do, especially for those of us who keep items we need to return to in our inbox, is start labeling those emails. Create an A/B list to help prioritize what needs your attention first. And always follow the one-minute rule. If you can respond in less than one minutes, don’t put it off and risk losing the email in a black hole. As they say, why put off for tomorrow, what you can do today?
Clean Up Your Follows
Calling all social media addicts, it’s time to clean your act up. Or at the very least your followers. Now that the algorithms for both Facebook and Instagram have changed, the likelihood of you seeing something chronically relevant is more slim. One sure fire way is to clean up who you follow. Get rid of any of those accounts you follow in the name of an Insta contest or that ‘friend’ who posts all those spammy quizzes.
Before you stop reading at the thought of “de-friending” someone {gasp}, how about instead going through or timeline and unfollowing them? We guarantee this will not only make your time spent on social media more relaxing but also more relevant to the people you do want to hear from!
Clean Up Your Apps
They say that if you haven’t worn something in a year, you’re probably safe to get rid of it. The same can be said for app, however instead of a year, if you haven’t used it in the last three months, you’re probably safe to get rid of it (here’s looking at you PokemonGo). These apps take up valuable space and given the amount of time we spend on our phones, if you haven’t used it in the last quarter are you really ever going to?
Clean Up Your Downloads
We all get those incessant notifications time to time that our computer/phone/tablet are about the run out of storage, or worse, already have! To help avoid this problem make sure to do at least monthly checks on downloads.
Easy culprits can be eBooks you’ve already read, songs your no longer listening to, podcasts you hit subscribe on but have never listened to and movies you downloaded to watch on a plane but won’t be revisiting anytime soon. These all major storage sucks and can take up valuable space.
Clean Up Your Photos
It happens every time you connect your phone to your computer. Your photo hub pops up, without thinking you click “Import New Photos” and then you never touch them again until you are frantically looking for the “one photo”. To get started on this, begin pulling together all your miscellaneous devices and media storage (old devices, USBs, memory cards, social media sites) and begin importing to your primary hub.
Once all the photos are imported, decide on how you want to categorize or organize photos. Perhaps it is by event, person or year. Pro tip: if you’re using iPhoto, they have a feature that detects faces with similar facial features and suggests tagging them.
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