By Jivitha Shobashree

We all like our houses to be neat, clean and organised. We take in the effort to remove all the unwanted stuff. It will be the same in our digital life as well. All our digital devices needs to be organised and arranged.

The other need for an organised digital life is that it saves time. Digital Declutter slows down your productivity and makes your computer slow due to the excess storage present in your devices.

These days our devices are used as storage for all aspects in our digital lives. We tend to save things which we know we will never need or be able to find. Digital declutter is a phenomenon of poor device maintenance. 

So in this post I will be explaining different ways to efficiently declutter your digital life.

  1. Documents/files

We save tons of our work documents and files thinking it will be of use one day but that one day will never come.

Try to remove these unnecessary documents or store them in an external drive. It will reduce your storage and you can easily access the files or documents which are of urgent need. 

All of us have a backup of all our documents. First thing you need to do is segregate the ones required and the ones not required. Then delete all the not required documents and the backups.

If you have too many files, start arranging them in chronological order.

  1. Detox your email

We all get a lot of mails which we don’t read. And searching for the required mails is a tiresome process because it gets mixed up with all the unnecessary mails.

Hence organising your mails is essential. Unsubscribe to the news letters you don’t read, arrange your mails in different folders. Don’t read your mails as and when you get them keep a time slot for an hour or so to read and reply to the mails. 

  1. Social media

I believe social media is a boon and bane. It can be very addictive to some people while the others make efficient use of it.

If using social media makes you sad the best way is to take some time of and try something new. 

 Organise your social media apps by either 

-Blocking feeds you don’t read.

-Unfollow people on your social media and be close to the ones who are close to you.

-Schedule a time to open your social media.

– mute your notifications so that you don’t get distracted. 

  1. Organised Photos

-First thing you all should do to organise your photos is to delete all the unwanted photos.

-Then start arranging your photos into different files and folders.

-Back your photos up into an external drive or other apps such as Google photos, iCloud etc.

-Delete the other photos on other devices.

  1. Unused Apps

We download so many apps as a one time use or thinking we’d use it again but how many of us continue to use those apps frequently?

Those apps are the unused apps.

Go through the apps you have in your phone and laptop/computer.

-delete the unused apps.

-go to your settings and find out the app that you use less frequently, hide them or offload the app.

-then start organising your apps based on the usage and tasks performed.

The conclusion

This digital age has been muddled and misguided.

With an explosion of apps and information it becomes difficult to keep track of what is required and what is not which ultimately leads to reaching your storage capacity.

That is when organizing your digital life comes into picture. 

In the words of Francine jay

“Decluttering is infinitely easier when you think of it as deciding what to keep, rather than deciding what to throw away.”