Ready to reclaim your sanity and conquer the chaos taking over your devices? A digital declutter will not only be refreshing, but ultimately saves you time and mental space. It’s time to say goodbye to the junk and hello to a more streamlined virtual life.

What is a Digital Declutter?

Unchecked subscriptions and neglected downloads take up so much storage, it’s that “out of site, out of mind” factor. Next thing you know, your device is running super slow, takes forever to download anything, and the “your storage is full” message that irks you beyond belief. Before you frantically search online for ways to get your life in order, it’s important to pause and consider whether it’s truly the digital clutter that’s causing you stress.

Perhaps it’s just specific areas, such as managing photos and files, that are overwhelming you. Getting rid of your digital mess can give you a sense of empowerment and control. It provides the clarity and organization necessary to accomplish tasks.

Surprising Stats on Digital Decluttering

The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. About 1 in 3 people never delete emails. The average smartphone user has 80 apps installed, but regularly uses only 9.25% of apps installed are never used. The average person has 582 unorganized photos on their smartphone. 49% of people say organizing digital files is more stressful than cleaning their home

Without getting too analytical, most smartphones, tablets, and laptops, come with an internal storage of 64-128 GB gigabytes. Your desktop computer is closer to 256 gigabytes. To put it into perspective, if you are working with 128 GB, the storage will be maxed out if you have all the following: 900 images, 1,000 songs, 20 movies, 100 apps/games and 1 hour of UHD videos.

How to do a Digital Declutter

Just like tidying up our home, our digital lives need regular decluttering too. It’s about taking control of our digital consumption and minimizing the unnecessary to make room for what truly matters. This involves organizing files, streamlining our online presence, and breaking free from the grip of endless notifications. Let’s explore practical steps to declutter our digital lives and rediscover a sense of calm and focus.

If you want to feel a bit at ease while you are getting rid of items on your device, do a complete backup. You can get an external SD card or cloud storage account that will hold all of your current items as you delete them from your device.

When your devices start slowing down, constantly restarting, or just not performing its best, you might not need a new device… Just a little digital declutter could do the trick!

Tidy Up Your Email Inbox

A majority of people have their email app downloaded on their phone and also on their laptop/computer. A little tip here, doing a digital declutter to your personal email is more efficient when done on your desktop computer. But, let’s be honest: most people find emails to be a major annoyance. They simply create a fancy to-do list that hinders productivity!

So, the ultimate goal with emails is to minimize the number sitting in your inbox. One of the simplest ways to manage emails is to search and organize them by sender. This allows you to quickly see who’s filling up your inbox and easily delete or archive multiple emails from specific senders at once.

Another keyword to put into your email search bar is “Unsubscribe”. This will pull up all the newsletters you subscribe to. If you notice that the same newsletter subscription is coming into your inbox multiple times a day or week, there is typically an “update subscription options” at the bottom of the email.

It’s surprising that some of the most mundane emails can take up such a large amount of storage on your device. To find emails that are larger than 5 MB, type “size:5 MB” (without the quotation marks)

Clean Up Your Digital Photos

Why stress over fixing up photos or managing a pile of disorganized images when you can take advantage of the advanced tools available in photography apps? Features like facial recognition and automatic date and time stamps can make the process much easier.

In most cases, you can delete photos from your phone after uploading them to a social media platform. Places like Instagram and Facebook will store your photos forever, just don’t get locked out of that account!

The Photos app on iPhones can identify faces in pictures and organize them into the “People” album. Adding names to faces allows users to search for photos by a person’s name. In addition, Apple provides options to search for images by date, location, events, and categories like “beach,” “sunset,” or “food.” Similar functions are typically available in the photo galleries of Android phones and in apps like Google Photos, which can help locate memories such as a wedding from last summer, your best friend, a pet, or your favorite city.

To free up space and tidy things up, it’s also recommended to remove blurry or duplicate photos. Google Photos offers a feature to quickly review and delete blurry photos, while the Remo Duplicate Photos Remover app can help eliminate duplicates. Apple users can also achieve this by using the iPhone Photos app, navigating to “albums,” “duplicates,” and selecting “merge.”

Photo file sizes vary among smartphones based on their camera specifications, but typically, each photo takes up about 5 MB of storage. For casual photographers, a phone with 1 GB of storage should suffice for storing around 200 photos. However, if you love taking selfies, you’ll need at least 30 GB of storage to accommodate approximately 6,000 photos.

Perform an App Audit

Sort through neglected files and apps. Find the culprits, duplicates, and unnecessary items taking up valuable space. If you haven’t used an app in the past few months, delete it! It is still available in the app store for you to download again in the future.

Android and Apple operating systems all come with a “Storage” setting. You can view your apps, their size, and how much storage they are using. If available, sort this list by file size largest to smallest and start from the top. You may just find that you have several apps just for editing photos, shopping, games etc., that you forgot you downloaded!

You can prevent downloading apps and games that are a ridiculous waste of storage by looking at the “more information” section of the app in the app store. Additionally, group similar apps in folders to make it easier to navigate a less chaotic screen.

Maintain Your Organized Device After a Digital Declutter

Keeping up with digital clutter will definitely help you live a stress-free day-to-day life. Regularly deleting unnecessary files and apps, coupled with uninstalling unused programs, frees up valuable storage space. Taking advantage of cloud storage for media and documents further reduces on-device clutter.

Organizing files into well-labeled folders and using storage management tools provides a clear picture of your storage usage. A clean desktop and home screen, along with regular backups, contribute to a smoother user experience. Lastly, clearing cache and temporary files, updating software, and utilizing external storage for large files ensures optimal device performance and frees up space for what matters.