[2022-03-05] Digital decluttering
For the past week, I've been decluttering and organizing physical files and assets, including documents I brought home from the office in September. While I had found a home for most things that I had packed up from my office last fall, I still had two boxes in a corner of my bedroom waiting to be sorted and stored.
With my son's recent departure, I've been able to use his old room to collect and organize various documents and books. It was tremendously satisfying to finally find a home for the mementos I wanted to keep and to filter out the pieces I no longer needed.
Yesterday, I turned my attention to my digital assets. My first task was to organize the files on my tablet hard drive. Today, I decluttered various lists in Google Keep.
Decluttering, organizing and backing up my online resources will take some time, especially because I have files stored across many platforms: documents, photos and music on my tablet and in an external hard drive, documents in Evernote, emails in Gmail, phone numbers in Google Contacts, saved articles in Pocket, and various lists, documents and photos in Google Keep, Google Photos, Google Docs and Google Drive.
Elaine Meyer offers a helpful definition of digital decluttering in her article How to Declutter Your Digital Life & Reclaim Your Attention: "A digital declutter is an audit of your entire digital life, followed by removing or reorganizing everything into a simpler, more secure, and more backed up system." She defines four steps in the process:
- Do an overview of all things digital (files, folders, accounts, etc.).
- Delete anything you don’t need.
- Reorganize what’s left.
- Maintain the decluttered life with simple and consistent habits.
Being retired gives me the luxury of time to review my digital holdings, get rid of what is no longer needed, organize the rest in logical groupings that will make it easier for me to find things in the future, and to maintain my new system.
I find it helpful to pick one task that I can do within the time available to me on any given day. I'm not trying to organize years worth of digital belongings in one marathon session. Meyer offers similar advice: "Be patient with yourself on this project—it’s all about having a framework, with tasks you can slowly chip away at."
Meyer's article goes beyond decluttering documents, photos, music and email to pruning the use of social media, news feeds, apps and accounts. I'll get to the latter eventually, but for now I'm focusing on records of personal value.
