Take a leaf from Marie Kondō‘s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and follow these simple steps to give your digital life a spring clean.
Passwords – Protect & Forget
If you forget your password often and spend more time resetting passwords than you do actually accessing the websites, you’ll be relieved to discover LastPass, a password management program. Once set-up it will auto-fill your passwords for every website, so you never have to remember them again.
Inbox – Zero is for Heroes
Some may laugh in the face of getting down to zero emails in their inbox each day, but we can all agree that having a small amount in your inbox at any time is the only way to be truly on top of your work and stay organised. When you receive an email act on it immediately, add it to your to-do list and file it away or delete it. Unroll me is also a nifty tool. It will track down all your email subscriptions, enable you to unsubscribe easily, and then collates all remaining subscriptions into one daily email.
Web Browsers – Bookmark & Organise
If you add up all the seconds it takes each day to google a website and then click on the page, you’re wasting a lot of time every year. Bookmark all your frequently visited sites and categorize each bookmark to save time. Review your list of bookmarks every couple of months to ensure your folders aren’t getting cluttered with websites you’re not using (let’s be real, when will you ever get to all those etsy home projects?).
App Control
Take off all your social media notifications, and instantly welcome a new sense of calm into your life. Why would you want to be at the mercy of your constantly buzzing phone? While you’re at it swipe through your phone and delete any apps you don’t use. They all remain on the cloud anyway, so you can access them if needed at a later date.
Manage Your Media – Clean Up & Back Up
One computer fail and you could lose all your precious photos. Back up everything on your computer, on a hard-drive, or websites such as Flickr, Apple Photos or other Cloud based storage solutions. Then organise your media.
Documents – Ditch Or File
Is your desktop cluttered with files? My docs folder full of no longer needed screenshots? Go through and delete files that you no longer need. Then organise your remaining documents into folders that makes sense to you. This will also help improve your computer’s speed.
By applying some (or all) of these tips, you’re guaranteed to start feeling lighter online in no time! If you want to go one step further, why not tackle that ever-growing list of social media “friends” and remove the strangers that snuck in and people you no longer speak to.
