8 Tips for Decluttering and Organizing Your Digital Spaces

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On average, a person will spend at least 7 hours of their day with a screen in front of their face. Nearly just as much time you spend in your bed/bedroom. Point being, your digital space is just as much of your environment as your bedroom or any other room in your house is. Decluttering your digital environment is just as important of a chore as cleaning your room or washing the dishes.

Having a clean and organized digital space will help you get through tasks more smoothly by helping you find important documents/files easier while also preventing distraction. I’m 100% I’m not the only one out there who can think more clearly and focus better when my work space is decluttered and organized.

Below, you’ll find several of my go-to tactics for managing my digital space and keeping it clean, organized, and decluttered.

Decluttering Your Desktop: Use Cloud Storage

Let me preface this with a little explanation of what cloud storage actually is.

Cloud storage is a service where your data is kept in “off-site” servers that are located in physical locations that are housed by “host”. Essentially, you are paying (or using for free in some cases) to use large physical storage space for your digital files.

Aside from the fact that using Cloud storage has kept my phone from alerting me of “low storage”, it has also helped me to keep everything all in one place between my digital devices. In addition to clearing up my desktop.

Another perk of using cloud storage is that it is usually seamless, and can be accessed from all of your devices as long as you have access to the internet.

Personally, pay $2.99/month for an additional 200GB of iCloud storage. On top of the storage space that came with my phone/computers. I use my iCloud storage for my more personal documents and files. Like photos from my phone and important day to day documents that would otherwise be cluttering up my desktop.

In addition to Apple’s iCloud, I also utilize Google Drive. I use Google Drive mostly for my business-related files.

This one, you can use for free for the first 15 GB. After that, it is $1.99/month for 50 BG or $19.99/year. I’m not affiliated with Google Drive other than my own personal use. I recommend it because I’ve found it to be a very helpful resource for keeping my digital life decluttered.

Get an External Hard Drive

If loud-based storage isn’t for you, another option that you can utilize to help declutter your digital life is an external hard drive. These handy little devices come in any range of storage capacity and are pretty affordable. Depending on the amount of storage that you need.

My fellow millennials out there: Remember floppy discs? Or blank CD’s that you would use to burn music programs onto way back when? External hard drives are the new, 21st century version of those. They generally will plug into your computer using a USB adapted wire. Similar to a thumb drive memory stick.

I recommend this 1 TB external hard drive from Seagate. My husband swears by them as a good tech brand, and he’s my go-to guy when it comes to technology. He’s a total nerd and has a wealth of knowledge with these things.

The perk of using an external hard drive is, of course, the amazing decluttering abilities that comes with having all of that extra, secure storage space. With only a one time payment, not monthly. On the other hand, unless you bring it with you everywhere, an external hard drive is only accessible when you have it plugged into your device.

Decluttering Your Inbox: Unsubscribe from Email Newsletters

With the information we covered in the last section, about the average person receiving more than 100 emails daily, I think it’s safe to assume that most inboxes have a few thousand emails in them to be addressed or deleted.

Currently, my primary Gmail in box has one 10,000 unread emails siting in it. Driving me absolutely crazy! But it’s a work in progress on my end. It’s sad, but I must admit it is looking a lot better than it was months ago.

Since the average is over 100 emails received daily, I make it a goal to try to delete more than 100 emails that don’t serve any purpose to me, daily. I try to get a head of the game rather than feeling like I am getting no where fast by only deleting a couple emails daily.

This, combined with unsubscribing from email newsletters that have no purpose being in my inbox anymore, has really helped me to get my inbox under control and decluttered.

Stop Making New Email Accounts

I had to learn this one from experience as well. By the time I was 26, I had 5 email accounts. Not including the one that my college or workplace made me. That’s 5 personal email accounts. Two, I already had for a few years, one I made for work and nursing emails only after graduating nursing school and starting my job hunt, and two for my online businesses.

At this point, I regret making so many and wish I had stuck to 2-3 at the most. It’s even harder now, to clean out and reroute these emails from one inbox to another in order to delete an email account entirely.

Whether are considering making a new email account because you are sick of seeing an inbox of over 10,000 emails, or you think you might want a new email address for a specific purpose, really think hard about it first!

First, try taking the steps to clean out your primary inbox and utilizing it for what you think you need a new account for. Before creating a new place for clutter.

Decluttering Your Internet Browser: Clean Up your Bookmarks

If cleaning up your internet browser is a new concept to you, don’t worry. You’re definitely not the only one. I learned a few of these things only in the past couple of years, my self.

There are a few things you can do to declutter your internet brokers, as well as speed it up. First, you will want to go through your bookmarks and get rid of the saved web pages that you don’t need any more.

The same concept can apply to your search history. While you’re working on your browser, you might as well delete cookies as well to help speed things up.

Tidy Up your Desktop

This one is just good housekeeping. The desktop of a computer can become incredibly cluttered in a matter of minutes. Between saving new documents, creating new folders, and the various downloads that tend to hang around on the desktop for a while after use.

This one shouldn’t take very long. It’s just like managing physical files and documents. Put everything in it’s home (aka assigned folder) and throw anything that isn’t needed anymore in the trash. To speed up your future decluttering efforts, this is one thing that you can do on a daily or weekly basis to keep up with it all.

My paranoid self hesitates to delete things sometimes. With that mindset of “what if I need this later?”. I have a folder in my iCloud drive specifically for this. This allows me to declutter my desktop/hard drive, while keeping these “just in case” things neatly tucked away for that one in a million moment if it ever comes to be.

Delete Unused Applications and Programs

This goes for both Mac and Windows computers. I use Apple products, so I can’t speak for the exact methods on how to get rid of applications or programs on a windows computer. But I do know that having excess of either can bog down your machine as well as add to the clutter.

Just a side note: I definitely do not recommend deleting anything if you don’t know what it is or what it’s purpose is in your computer. If you’re unsure do a little research on the program that you are looking at deleting. Just incase it’s something vital to your computers operating systems.

Empty Your Downloads Folder and Trash

For Mac users, our download folder can be easily accessed through Finder. Not too sure of what route Windows users will need to take, but I can promise you have one of these folders. Emptying that out will help with decluttering and organizing your digital life, as well as speed up your machine noticeably.

After removing all of this stuff (applications, programs, documents, etc) your virtual trashcan is probably bursting at the seams. Now that you’ve organized and files away the vital documents and have thrown out what you know you don’t want or need, it’s time to empty the trash and call it a day.

What else do you do to keep your digital spaces clean and organized?