Who doesn’t need some help with cleaning up technology? Try these steps for How to use the Marie Kondo Methods to Organize Your Digital Life and get it back on track.
If you have read The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up, you have probably been inspired to declutter and organize your home. But have you tackled your computer and email? These tips on how to use the Marie Kondo organization methods to organize your digital life. This is for those who have a digital mess on their hands. If you have overflowing inboxes, a constant stream of posts that you have no interest in on Facebook and Instagram, and a ridiculously long list of Pinterest boards these tips will help get it under control. It is for those who love the idea of Marie Kondo but want to make practical applications of her organization tips to simplify your computer and online activities.
How to Use Marie Kondo Methods to Organize Your Digital Life
Rather than working through clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and sentimental items we are going to work on digital categories. I do love how Marie Kondo from category to category rather than room to room, plus the bonus is on most of these categories the changes you make will of course automatically apply across devices, with the exception of documents and photos that may be different on each device. Let’s get started, shall we?
How to Organize Emails
Does your email spark something so far from the joy that you dread opening it anymore? The first thing you do is go into your inbox and look at all the emails from places you never open. Maybe you were added to a mailing list trying to get a freebie, a coupon, or because you made a purchase, and you don’t want to be on their list anymore. Grab one of those emails, scroll to the bottom and hit unsubscribe, follow all the way through, this will stop those bad boys from coming in.
Now to clean up the rest of your inbox do a search for that brand or company in the search box, then select all and delete all the emails. Repeat with all your other emails until your inbox is shiny and fresh. Now, don’t sign up for another newsletter unless it will Spark Joy in you, like emails from this site right?
How to Organize Digital Images
If you are like me you have thousands upon thousands of images on your computer, phone, and tablets. You probably rarely print the pictures yet due to this digital age we are living it is so easy to capture everything from last nights Instagram worthy pot roast to cat memes. However, some of those pictures are of events, family, and lots of memories that you want to keep. Start flipping through and delete the blurred images, the 15 shots of the same thing, and those that don’t really tell the story. Cut out as many pictures as you can in this step.
Now take the remaining images and put them in files if they aren’t already. Name the files with titles that will make it easy to find what you are looking for. Technology has made it so that our images are already organized by date on phones and tablets and this makes it easier to organize and purge items, but you want to get real names on the images and files, because 2 years from now you won’t be able to remember the exact day of junior’s epic baseball game, or the impromptu picnic, or the father-daughter dance.
How to Organize Documents
While computers, google drive, or the cloud hold massive amounts of paperwork for us, that doesn’t mean we need to hold onto all of it. I pay a little extra for storage to use Google Drive as well as the cloud due to the fact that my entire family shares it but it was getting to where I needed to upgrade to the next level, which I thought was totally unnecessary. It may take a while but like me, you may need to weed through your documents and delete those that are no longer needed or relevant. This will save space, make things easier to find, help your device run better, and save you from paying to upgrade on storage!
External Storage
If you don’t want to delete documents and/or you have a lot of images that you want to keep, you can make space on your computer by moving them to portable external hard drive. External storage is a smart idea even if you don’t need extra space on your computer because you can save a backup copy of all of your important documents and images in case something happens to your computer.
How to Clean Up Web Browsers
Pop onto your bookmarks and scroll through them, chances are there are loads of sites saved that you no longer need or visit, remove them. Redo your bookmark toolbar so that your top sites are easily at your fingertips.
How to Clean Up Social Media
Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook… These apps, though useful, can weigh us down emotionally and steal our precious time. Have you ever felt like leaving social media or just taking a break? Then you are definitely going to want to purge them. Just like closets, boxes of old photos, and the junk drawer social media needs to be weeded out once in a while so that you only get the “meat” from people, blogs, and brands that interest you.
Facebook: Unfriend people and unlike pages that no longer bring your joy. If unfriending seems too extreme, simply unfollow friends that don’t spark joy. One experiment I have tried is to “Snooze people for 30 days”. If when they pop back in my feed 30 days later they still cause me stress, I either unfollow or unfriend.
Instagram: You can unfollow or if it is a relative that you don’t want to offend, you can mute them, so they don’t show up in your feed. When on your phone app, click the 3 dots above the image, scroll down to click the mute button. Have you followed any hashtags? Sometimes inappropriate things show up, just unfollow the hashtag to clean up your feed.
Pinterest: If you don’t like what is in your feed, it could be because Pinterest has chosen things for you that don’t actually match your interests in your “home” feed. If you are on a laptop, you have the option of only seeing who you follow by clicking on the “following” button in the top right corner. If you are on your phone, click the 3 buttons and hide what you don’t want to see and Pinterest may slowly start sharing more relevant pins. You may also want to go through the topics you are following. Remember when you joined Pinterest and they made you pick topics of interest. You can go through and unfollow those to decrease the random, inappropriate pins.
Twitter: Unfollow people and brands that are cluttering up your feed with things you do not wish to see. If you don’t want to unfollow someone, you can mute their account. Click the down arrow above a tweet, then scroll down and click “mute”.
