Cleaning a digital clutter isn’t much different from sorting your closet. Here are some tips for cleaning your digital closet. This post is sponsored by Compass Datacenters.
As often said in the materials on the Digital Clutter Course, the accumulation of digital clutter is a relatively new problem for humanity. This is a new frontier for problem solving, as computers, cloud-based storage, and data centers are almost over half a century ago. We’ve been organizing our closets for thousands of years, but at most we’ve been organizing our folders and photos for decades!
According to a survey by the Compass data center, 59% of people want to tackle dirty dishes rather than clean their digital files. In fact, Americans would rather clean most of the space in their garage, car or garden on top of their devices. Why is this?
A few important reasons are that people will put off this important task.
Fear paralysis of deleting something they may need to postpone later/analyze/no time to be overwhelmed
So let’s simplify this process by knowing how to do it: get your clothes organized!
Clean your digital closet
1. Simplify what you own
Fact: The less you have, the less things you need to organize. This also depends on the clothes in the closet, the kitchen cooking, and all the digital mess.
Whether you’re looking into the folders on your clothes or your computer’s hard drive, the first step is to always delete anything you don’t need. This important first step makes the rest of the process extremely simple. After a clean clean, you will feel light and store less.
As you walk through the closet, you may donate clothes that no longer fit, have signs of wear and tears, or may not suit your style. Next, apply these same guidelines to your digital clutter.
How to simplify to a digital clutter:
Please unsubscribe for a week from the extra email. Spend an hour deleting files that you don’t need. Spend 10 minutes deleting apps you don’t need.
2. I’ll sort it out
Once you’ve removed all your clothes from your closet that you don’t need to store, the next step is to organize what’s left. How you organize your clothes is up to you – by style, season, and color. Similarly, choose your digital closet organizer strategy. There are ways to organize your files and photos by year, category, and topic.
Tips for organizing your digital clutter:
Few folders are better than many. There will be fewer places to check. Use search-friendly file names using keywords. Instead of “IMG4597”, change the photo to “2025 Trip to Disney World” Clean up your photos by removing screenshots, duplicates, or blurry photos.
3. Set up the system
Decide how to maintain a neat closet with our garments. If folding takes too long and leads to messy mountains, you might have decided to hang a group of clothes (jeans, sweaters) instead. You can probably turn around with the hanger and see which items you are actually wearing.
If you want to maintain a decent digital space, commit to a system you know you’ll stick to. Remove reminders on your mobile phone once a week until it becomes a habit.
Maintain a minimal digital space:
Visit Inbox Zero daily. I’m ruthless about subscribed emails. Do not use your inbox as a filing cabinet. Move information from emails to calendars, notes apps, or cloud storage, allowing emails to be archived. Once a week, sort the photos you take and remove anything that isn’t worth saving. Decide how to save your most precious memories. Here are some tips for storing photos. Don’t overstore! Every time you start saving something, ask yourself if you really need to save it. If you need to refer to something, can you find it by searching the web or your email instead?
Do you want more clutter?
Want to learn more tricks for digital organizations? Here’s my free workshop: How to organize your emails, photos and files.
