Cleaning Up My Digital Life | How I Did It & How You Can Too

It's amazing to what extents we will go to adapt instead of taking situations head on.

Over the past few months, I've developed a little convoluted system for uploading images to my blog and socials. I would download my images and Canva edits, place them on my desktop, use them for the blog/socials, move them again to downloads and never bother to rename or organize them along the way. It's like back in high school when you could've just read the book because it was easy and you had more than enough time but you "had better things to do" and would purposely torture yourself by waiting until the last minute to search spark notes and get pissed when you couldn't find the answers because spark notes didn't have enough detail (whoops, looks like the cat's out of the bag lol).

It would have just been easier to do it the right way from the beginning - but no, someone was too stubborn for that (someone being me). It was time to do a deep clean of my entire digital life.

Here's how I cleaned up my act... and how you can clean up yours too!

• Go through all of your downloads - Decide which photos/documents you need to keep and organize them into folders. For the ones you don't need, move them to the trash.

• Go through your emails - I don't like seeing the notifications so I open all of my emails. If you keep getting emails that you do not want, UNSUBSCRIBE (you will thank yourself later). Also make sure to clear out your junk and your trash folders - you don't need them.

• Go through your folders and files - If you don't need something, move it to the trash. If you do need something, take this chance to organize it (you will thank yourself later).

• Go through your saved music and podcasts - If you don't need it downloaded, remove it from your downloads. It's as simple as that.

• Go through your open windows - If you don't need it anymore, close it out. It's not doing you any good by being open.

• Go through your photos - this is most likely going to be the most time consuming step, but it's also the most rewarding. Delete all duplicates, mess-ups, screenshots you no longer need, etc, etc. It's one of the most amazing feelings in the world to go through my photos app and only see photos that I want to see.

• Go through all of your apps - If you don't need apps, get rid of them. You can always re-download them when necessary.

• Go through all of your text conversations - I don't know about you but I found so many little group chats or one-off conversations that I really did not need anymore. It was so nice to only see the correspondents that I use on a regular and/or semi-regular basis.

• Go through all of your voicemails - Keep the ones you need, delete the ones you don't (you'll thank yourself later).

• Go through your social media accounts - For more tips on this step, please see my post on Using Social Media With Intention.

Not only will these steps clear memory and room on your devices, they will clear memory and space in your mind. It might be a little bit of a time investment on the front end, but you won't believe how much time - and stress - you will save on the backend.

I hope this helps to bring some clarity to your digital life. Happy cleaning!

Sending love always,

J.S.