After decluttering our house last month, let’s declutter even more this December! Here are five tips for digital cleaning. Since December is such a busy month, just do these when you found some time. And if not, these are also some awesome new years resolutions.
Apps, programs and contacts
Check the contacts in your telephone and mail provider and clean them up. There might be some contacts you had brief contact with once. An owner of a holiday home, the buyer of your marketplace advertisement, etc. etc…..
But there are probably also apps on your phone and/or tablet and programs on your computer that you no longer use. Digital cleaning it is; Get rid of them!
Unwanted emails
Unsubscribe from all email newsletters at least for one week, but preferably longer (or forever from now on). Besides saving you a lot of junk mail, it also saves yout a lot of money. Because do you really need the products they tell you about?
There are a number of companies where I regularly order something. I like to use coupons of discount promotions while ordering, so for those companies I tolerate the unwanted e-mails the rest of the time. So don’t be to rigorous.
Manuals
Do you also have a folder full of manuals at home? Did you know you can probably find (almost) all of them online?
If you have problems or questions, you can view or download the manuals online at that moment. But if you don’t like searching for them at that time, download them now and email them to yourself. Create a folder for the manuals in your mailbox, in which you keep them.
But wait, Is this actually digital cleaning or not at all…… Whatever, I think it’s a nice tip :).
Photos and other media
Perhaps a bit obvious, but go through your photos (and other media).
Way too many photos
Failed photos or those in which people look weird don’t have to be saved forever, right? And do you really want to save ten photos of the same tree for later?
Not sure if you want to get rid of them (yet)? Then make a selection of the photos you like best and drag the rest to a separate folder. This saves searching between hundreds of photos in the future. And maybe someday you’ll delete them…
By the way, if the photos are on your phone, move them to your computer or in the cloud if you have enough space here.
Other photos that often take up unnecessary space on your phone are the sent whatsApp photos. Did you know, that if you send one photo to four different people, your phone will save the original and all of the four sent photos?
I own an android phone and delete them as follows: “my files – internal storage – whatsapp – media – whatsapp images – sent”. I then do the same with the other folders in this “media” folder.
Before deleting, I first scroll through them instead of deleting everything at once, because the media you created in a whatsApp conversation are probably not stored anywhere else on your phone.
And then this folders with a lot of media that are of no use to you: received whatsapp media. On my android phone I can find them in my gallery. I always check this one too before deleting. Sometimes you get photos that you want to keep, but for most of them: delete. This is some massive digital cleaning, isn’t it?
Your gallery
The last photo cleaning tip, again one for your phone: other folders in your gallery. Many apps create their own folder in your gallery. I move these photos to another folder if I want to keep them, so I have a better overview in my gallery. Sorted by date, they are immediately in the right place in their new folder. For the rest: delete…. There is a lot that can go, especially in the screenshots folder!
Folders
More overview on your phone/tablet or computer? Create folders. Get rid of all of those apps on the home screen of your phone and all individual files at your desktop. Much clearer in folders and you can find everything way easier.
Also check (especially on your computer) whether you can delete files in stead of dragging them in a folder.
These tips are probably not all new to you. But hopefully this is a boost to actually do them this December.
Do you have any other digital cleaning tips? Let me know!