Spring Cleaning Goes Digital
Your closets aren’t the only thing that could benefit from a little tidying up this spring. On your quest to rid your home of clutter and dust bunnies, be sure to carve out some time to spruce up your digital files so your life feels as organized as your home.
A natural place to start is your email inbox. Between correspondences with friends and family, bills, newsletters, appointment reminders and promotional messages, the daily deluge of incoming items can quickly overwhelm even the most organized person.
Use folders to sort emails into categories, like “home,” “school,” “travel” and “kids’ sports” to make it easier to reference these items later. Consider implementing action-oriented categories for folders as well, such as “To Do Today,” “To Do this Week” and “Read Later.” Many email providers offer rules or filters that you can set to send emails automatically into the relevant folder.
To reduce the number of emails you receive, unsubscribe from any marketing solicitations or newsletters that no longer deliver relevant content to you. Tools like Unroll.me and Unlistr can automatically remove your email from those lists, while Clean Email is a service that can clean up your account without having to delete thousands of old emails manually.
Next up, you can tackle your smartphone. Your device contains all the apps that keep you organized and entertained, and memories you’ve captured, but all of these items eat up storage space.
To ensure you always have the space you need, conduct periodic checks of your phone’s storage capacity. If there are apps you never use; or downloaded podcasts, TV shows or movies you’ve already enjoyed, purge those files from your phone. Storing photos and videos in the cloud can also free up large amounts of space, plus it keeps your memories safe in case anything happens to your phone. In lieu of housing your music library on your phone, consider switching to a music-streaming service like Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music so you’re never without your favorite tunes.
Before your smartphone was your go-to camera, you probably amassed quite a few photo albums or boxes of prints. To make more space in your home, you can take old photos to Costco or Walmart to digitize, or ship them off to online retailers who specialize in these services like Legacy Box and Kodak Digitizing Box.
This spring, experience the joy of ridding your life of the physical and virtual items you don’t need so you can get your entire house in order.