Cleaning up digital clutter is not all that different from sorting through your closet. Here are tips to clean out your digital closet for a more streamlined, simple online-life. This post is sponsored by Compass Datacenters.
As I often say in my Digital Clutter Course materials, the accumulation of digital clutter is a relatively new problem for humankind. Since computers, cloud-based storage, and data centers are barely more than half a century old, this is a new frontier of problem solving. We have been organizing closets for millennia but only organizing folders and photos for a few decades at best!
According to a survey by Compass Datacenters, 59% of people would rather tackle a sink of dirty dishes than clean out their digital files. In fact, Americans would rather clean out most spaces – their garage, car, or yard – over their devices. Why is this?
A few key reasons are keeping people procrastinating this important task:
- Fear of deleting something they might need later
- Procrastination / analysis paralysis / overwhelmed
- Not enough time
So let’s simplify this process with something we know how to do: sort clothes!
Clean Out Your Digital Closet
1. Simplify what you own
Fact: The fewer things you have, the fewer things you have to organize. This goes for clothes in your closet, dishes in your kitchen, and all of your digital clutter.
Whether you are going through your clothes or the folders on your computer’s hard drive, the first step should always be to remove anything you no longer need. This crucial first step makes the rest of the process so much easier. After a good clean out, you’ll feel lighter and be storing less.
When going through your closet you might donate clothes that no longer fit, have signs of wear and tear, or you don’t suit your style anymore. Now, just apply these same guidelines to your digital clutter.
Ways to simplify to digital clutter:
- Spend a week unsubscribing from superfluous emails.
- Spend an hour deleting files you no longer need.
- Spend 10 minutes deleting apps you no longer need.
2. Organize
Once you’ve removed all the clothes from your closet that you don’t need to keep, the next step is to organize what is remaining. How you choose to sort your clothes is up to you – by style, by season, by color. Similarly, choose an organizing strategy for your digital closet. How you sort files and photos is up to you: by year, by category, by topic.
Tips for organizing digital clutter:
- Fewer folders is better than many folders. You’ll have fewer places to check.
- Use search-friendly file names with keywords. Instead of “IMG4597”, rename (in bulk!) photos to “2025 trip to Disney World” or files to “Jane Doe beach packing list.”
- Clean up your photos by deleting screenshots, duplicates or blurry pics.
3. Set up a system
In our clothing analogy, decide how you’ll maintain your neat closet. If folding takes too much time and leads to a messy pile, maybe you decide to hang a group of clothes (jeans, sweaters) instead. Perhaps you turn your hangers around so you can see which items you actually wear that season.
If you want to maintain tidy digital spaces, commit to a system that you know you’ll stick to. Have a reminder go off in your phone once a week until it becomes habit.
Maintain a minimal digital space:
- Get to inbox zero on a daily basis. Be ruthless to the emails you subscribe to. Don’t use your inbox as a filing cabinet. Move information from the email to your calendar, Notes app, or cloud-storage so you can archive the email.
- Once a week, sort through the photos you took and delete any that aren’t worth saving. Decide how you will save your most precious memories. Here are some tips for photo storage.
- Don’t over save! Every time you begin to save something, ask yourself if you really need to save it. If you need to reference something, could you find it by searching the web or your email instead?
Want more organizing tips?
Want to learn a lot more tricks for digital organizing? Check out my free workshop here: How To Organize Your Email, Photos, and Files.
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