Digital clutter is a modern-day hoarder’s problem. What makes digital clutter a bigger problem than a more conventional physical clutter is that, while the latter is palpable, prompting some action, digital clutter can be strategically tucked away. However, the act of cleverly tucking away this kind of clutter does little to prevent the negative consequences of the growing clutter. If you’re new to this term and the concept of digital clutter and want to know why and how you can get rid of this vice, here’s all you need to know!
What is Digital Clutter?
Any of the things on your device can be classified as digital clutter if you have them but they don’t serve any purpose anymore. Whether it is that one app you had to install to get a specific task done at some point or the ebooks you happened to download but never got back to — digital clutter can be in your gallery, on your apps, your folders, or even your contacts list. Digital clutter, no matter how manageable it may seem, can distract you and make it just a little more difficult to access your go-to apps, books, photos, as it makes the task of browsing through digital resources time-consuming.
What is Digital Decluttering All About?
If you’re familiar with the act of cleaning your room and getting rid of things you no longer use from your closet and drawers, the concept of digital decluttering will not seem as alien. Much like you keep your physical space organized, all you need to do is delete things from your device that you no longer need so that you can reserve all your device’s space for important resources.
Knowing how to permanently delete photos from iCloud or clearing cache on your device can come in handy when you intend to keep your device clean and organized. Do you have numerous windows on your browser and spam messages in your inbox that have no use? If so, it might be time for you to commit to digital decluttering every once in a while.
Why Should You Commit to Regular Digital Decluttering?
As we spend more time on our phones and laptops, having our digital space cleared up by deleting what’s not needed can help keep our thoughts organized and leave our screens looking aesthetic. Yes, storage solutions are cheaper than ever, but when you declutter, you can use your device’s space and cloud space economically while improving speed.
Clutter, whether physical or digital, can be detrimental to one’s mental health and peace of mind. When we interact with disorganization on a daily basis, it can elevate our stress levels and leave us frustrated. Likewise, when your device only has apps, music, photos, and files that you need and is pretty much organized, finding things you need in your digital space can be hassle-free.
Here’s How You Can Declutter Your Device
- Get to Deleting Apps You Don’t Need
The first and the most important step to ensuring your device is sans clutter is to go through all your apps and make the decision about what stays and what goes. Apps are right on most device’s home screens. And when you look at apps that you don’t use on the daily, it is likely to make you feel mentally overburdened. The simple task of discarding what’s not needed will free up space on your device and make you feel relaxed.
- Organize
While you get rid of the clutter of excess by deleting, anything on your device that is not properly organized can also make for clutter. The simplest solution to the clutter of disorganization is to have a naming convention for files and photos, folders to cluster apps of the same category, and using cloud storage for important files to keep them safe and separated from the files you may access on a daily basis.
- Delete those Emails
Yet another source of clutter that is completely avoidable upon practising some discipline is email inboxes. Most of our social media notifications make it to our inbox. Further, if you’ve shared your email with businesses, you’re also likely to receive frequent promotional emails. Decluttering your email inbox from time to time can help you access your important emails with ease. You can also use certain tools that can help you automatically unsubscribe from unwanted emails.
- Create a Dedicated Space for Photos
One of the most clutter-infested spaces on most people’s phones is their photos app or gallery. While we may take multiple pictures to preserve them as a lifelong memory, we rarely revisit most of these pictures. And they end up taking way too much space and creating major clutter while offering the bliss of nostalgia only once in a blue moon. While you can get rid of certain photos, you can also create a dedicated space on your device for less frequently revisited photos or invest in a hard drive or cloud storage solution for these pictures. That way, as your main gallery is organized and has pictures that you frequently need to look at, your photograph-based memorabilia is also safe and secure.
- Say No To Needless Bookmarks
None of us can deny finding seemingly useful blogs and articles and saving them for a later read by bookmarking them. If you look at your bookmarks, there’s a good chance that you will find ones that have been on your device for years. And if you no longer relate to those bookmarks or feel the need to go through the content, it is a better idea to remove such bookmarks and preserve that space on your device only to resources that are truly important.
We all fall prey to the practice of procrastinating several tasks in our day-to-day lives, which leads to a bigger problem that is more time-consuming to solve. One of them is letting our rooms and devices get cluttered. Decluttering your phone, tablet, iPad, or laptop is not just good for your device’s performance and storage. It offers you the peace of mind that anything that is on your device serves some important purpose and this in turn gives you the assurance that the time you spend on your device is meaningful.