Digital De-Cluttering
Picture this: there’s a room in your house full of stuff. It’s a mix of important stuff like birth certificates and big purchase receipts, and sentimental stuff like paintings your kid made in kindergarten and your dad’s record collection. But there’s also just silly stuff in there - expired coupons, a disturbingly high number of keychains, old birthday invitations you’re hanging onto for some reason. This room is overflowing!
Every now and then you need to go into the room to collect something. But whenever you do, you’re met with the nightmarishly daunting task of wading through piles and piles of unorganized chaos just to find what you’re looking for. So, more often than not, you just keep the door closed and avoid it completely.
Now imagine that this room is your digital life. Maybe it’s the desktop of your computer brimming with 10 zillion icons, maybe it’s my your Google Drive that, despite the nicely labeled folders you created a few years ago, has fallen into disarray. Maybe it’s your *shudder* …email inbox.
You might say, “my cluttered computer desktop is not the same as a house full of junk - sure, it’s messy, but I can use the search function to find an app or document on my computer.” And while that’s true (can you imagine if you could just Ctrl+F for anything in your house?!), searching depends largely on your ability to remember what something was named (or at least something beyond a fuzzy recollection of its existence).
The ability to browse your digital spaces for things you’re looking for is important! And that’s made much easier if you occasionally “spring clean” your digital spaces. It’s never going to be the highest priority project - if you’re like me, you’ll find LOTS of creative ways to avoid doing it, but it is important, nonetheless. So let this be your friendly reminder that cleaning up the digital detritus of your desktop, your Google Drive, your email inbox, is important, worthwhile, and will help you actually want to utilize your technology to the fullest extent you can find benefit!
So make some time to go through your documents, files, emails - identify what’s important to keep and stash it in a logical folder, or label it in a useful way - and don’t forget to delete things you really don’t need. To go back to the cluttered room analogy, nobody needs 27 keychains. Not me, anyway. (Why do I have so many?)
