Tips for Making Your Digital Life More Organized
Nowadays, clearing your digital decluttering junk is as necessary as flossing twice daily. This is particularly true today when our inboxes overflow with messages, emails, files, and applications.
Neglecting to maintain order and cleanliness in our digital lives can severely affect our mental health and productivity. Some symptoms of a disorganized digital space are a fragmented attention span, fatigue, tension, and impatience.
Read on to learn about the dangers of digital clutter and to get a digital decluttering checklist to help you get started.
What is Digital decluttering?
Digital Decluttering:
Cleaning up your digital environment entails removing all of your
Everything you no longer need—apps, files, messages—from your computer, inbox, phone, tablet, or any combination.
It entails coming to terms with the fact that very few of your applications, add-ons, and programs have any actual use in your professional and personal life.
Clearing your digital space can help you with managing:
Your digital persona, your files (professional and personal), your gadgets, and the trash can.
Professor of computer science and vocal proponent of digital decluttering Cal Newport has authored two books that will serve as our guides as we walk you through digital decluttering: Digital Minimalism and Deep Work.
Disruptions caused by digital noise
Knowledge workers nowadays depend on digital areas such as apps, social media, and others to network, keep informed, and advance their careers.
Because of this, we wind up having many photos, documents, and social media apps. On top of that, our minds can be negatively affected by all this digital noise in the ways listed below.
Also Read: Preserving Lifelines: Understanding the Importance of Rivers
Problems with digital distractions
According to Cal Newport’s TEDx lecture, having many social media accounts causes attention to become fragmented and eventually leads to irreversible damage to concentration.
According to research from the Global Web Index, the average person uses six social media accounts and spends two to three hours daily on them.
As a result, the amount of notifications and interruptions increases directly to the number of social media accounts one has. Distractions and multitasking reduce our ability to concentrate.
Disruptions caused by digital media hinder efficiency and effectiveness
Also, according to Newport, the technology we assume will help us advance in our jobs is secretly hindering our growth.
The “always-on” mentality that gets in the way of regular work could be exacerbated by the constant need to be on all platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others.
More so, in a case study called “A case of digital hoarding,” the researchers discovered that a patient’s inability to sleep was due to the excessive number of digital images they had accumulated. Furthermore, their hoarding behavior disrupted the patient’s routine, making it difficult for them to walk outside, clean the house, and unwind.
Increased worry and tension caused by digital clutter
Research by Kerry Lakey and colleagues on digital hoarding (and, by extension, digital clutter) reveals that it causes stress for the following reasons:
Trouble locating and organizing data, Difficulty erasing digital objects, and Anxiety caused by their loss.
According to an article in the New York Times, Lakey has stated that the tension and anxiety caused by digital clutter are genuine. Northumbria University psychology expert Lakey claims digital cluttering is as detrimental to our well-being and productivity as physical clutter.
Expenses are increased by digital clutter.
As you may expect, digital hoarding can rapidly use your available storage space. Therefore, you can see that your monthly expenses increase due to the need for extra storage.
The positive aspects of purging digital clutter
digital decluttering life is similar to decluttering your home in that it provides you control over your workflow, reduces stress and anxiety, and, ultimately, peace of mind.
A longer attention span is another benefit of streamlining your digital life. If you want to stop getting too many notifications and focus on what matters, uninstalling unneeded apps is one way.
Digital decluttering is a habit that can help you save time and reduce clutter. According to a survey by Adobe, workers in the United States spend more than five hours per day checking their email. They can save time by clearing their inbox of unnecessary emails.
You may boost your productivity, clarity, and general well-being by saving yourself the trouble, time, and energy required to deal with these minor issues.
Next, we’ll review several clutter-busting strategies to improve your well-being and efficiency.
Concise guidelines for clearing off digital decluttering
We have compiled the following minimalist declutter checklist to assist you with digital decluttering your work computer, personal digital space, and phone.
Computer and file decluttering checklist for the office
Since you need to concentrate the most in your digital workspace, we’ll begin with a decluttering checklist to help you get everything in order. Find out how to keep your focus on the digital tasks at hand by reviewing these organizational strategies.
Minimize the number of folders.
If you’re confused about arranging your project folders, think of them as a Kanban board.
Restrict your task to no more than three or four folders:
You can sort things into three categories: Important (things you need every day or on that particular day), To-do (things you require the day after or a few days from now), and Miscellaneous (files you downloaded for future, unknown purposes).
Remember to update those folders daily and reorganize the documents based on their urgency or necessity. Furthermore, ensure you employ the correct folder structure by making subfolders inside your folders.
An additional method for organizing your folders is by using the Eisenhower Matrix:
Matters that are both important and urgent, matters that are important but not urgent, matters that are unimportant but urgent, and matters that are unimportant but not urgent.
That way, I can find the pictures and files that need deleting or moving to specific directories much more quickly.
Maintain a taskbar with your most-used programs.
From experience, you can see which programs take up the most space on your desktop and eliminate them. Sort those apps, then.
Putting your most-used apps on the taskbar is a breeze. You can avoid repeatedly minimizing windows to access the desktop in this manner.
The following are some of the tools I use when writing online:
The company uses the following tools: Pumble, Chrome, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, and Text Editor.
Keeping track of which programs you use most often on your taskbar will help you determine which ones are essential and which ones aren’t. Eliminating unused apps has never been easier than this.