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Lorie Marrero author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life is here to help us all tackle the digital clutter in our lives. Lorie has shared the following tips and answered my digital organization questions.
10 Simple Tips to Declutter Your Digital Life
It’s that time of year again, and warming weather means blooming messes. But this season, the chaos isn’t limited to the house and garage. Email inboxes are also overflowing, and online folders, files and photos are piling up on computer desktops. Spring cleaning typically means dusting out old corners and straightening up winter clutter – but organization is going digital as more people are spending their time online.
- Declutter Your Desktop: Treat your desktop as you would the top of your actual desk and keep only active files and shortcuts there for convenience. Use your My Documents folders for more lasting storage. Clean off unnecessary shortcuts that clutter the screen.
- Get Your Files in Order: After you get your desktop sparklingly clean, take a look through your folders. Can you consolidate? Are there old files you can remove, or drafts that are no longer relevant? Remember, your time is valuable and storage space is plentiful, so archiving to a folder or external storage space is usually a better use of time than wading through lots of old documents.
- Time for Your Inbox to Drop a Few Pounds: Do you really need those attachments in email? Save your large files to an online storage drive like Windows Live SkyDrive, which offers 25 GB of free storage. Easily upload videos, photos and files, and share them with whomever you’d like – without overloading their inboxes.
- Take time to Back up Important Files: Granted it’s easy to get too busy to back up files, and it’s not something many of us take time to do. But your valuable photos and documents are irreplaceable. By saving them to an external hard drive, you’ll never worry about losing precious memories and information.
- Kick Calendar Chaos: Who is supposed to drive carpool today? If the carpool schedule is on your refrigerator and you’re at work, it can be difficult to coordinate multiple schedules in multiple locations. Free online calendar services such as Windows Live Calendar allow you to easily share multiple calendars with family members and friends from anywhere.
- Optimize Your Computer’s Performance: For greater efficiency and avoiding the heartache of technical problems, remember to update and run important utilities like spyware and virus scans and defragment your hard drive periodically.
- Organize Your Email Contacts: Do you spend more time searching than you spend sending? Consolidate your contacts from multiple accounts and applications in one place with Windows Hotmail. You can also create email groups from your contact list for your book club or close set of friends so you can easily send email without wasting time digging for addresses.
- Email Overload: Practice the “A.R.T.” of e-mail reduction. Process your email inbox daily by immediately deciding whether the messages fall into the category of Action, Reference, or Trash. File your mail in specific folders, like bills, travel, or entertainment, so you can easily find what you’re looking for.
- Be Camera Ready: Make sure your digital camera is always ready for more pictures by uploading your images after each event. Free downloadable applications such as Windows Live Photo Gallery make it easy for you to find, fix and share photos immediately with friends and family.
- Organize Your Favorites: Imagine finding and accessing your favorite web links from anywhere and sharing them easily with your friends! Organize your favorites in Internet Explorer and synchronize them with an online storage drive, and you can access them from any computer and keep them up to date as you find new things to remember and share online.
My Digital Chaos
I have data everywhere! Seriously… it’s rather scary. I do have some storage systems in place, but I have a lot of data and it is currently in a lot of different places. I need to do some major digital tackling.
My first step is the desktop where I’m currently typing this post. Last night I kicked off a 12 hour backup of photos and today I’m trying to comb through and figure out all the folders where I have data that is not yet backed up. I want to make sure I have all my data backed up externally before I start reorganizing it.
My next step, which will take some time, is to try and organize my photo storage systems. I’m going to follow some of Lorie’s suggestions and I’ll report back in a future post.
Good list. A couple to add to the list. With backups, it is a good idea to have off site storage.
And with emails, periodically go through your list of newsletters that you have subscribed to and unsubscribe to them if you are no longer finding them useful. That will save you a bit of time in the long run. Sometimes digital clutter is even worse than other forms of clutter because it can build up easier and quicker.
Okay…so it’s Wednesday so I hope it’s still okay to post. I love all your idea on reducing the digital clutter…now if I can get my teens to join in..hmm
I’m checking in very late again today. But, I have my FIRST tackle it Tuesday enrty today- come check it out!
Thanks for hosting Tackle It Tuesday! Now I have a purpose on Tuesdays…and no more excuses not to do those “put off till tomorrow” tasks.
HI everybody. I want to encourage you to share your cooking successes at Momtrends on Friday Feasts. I will post a Mr. Linky each week. Here is last weeks:
http://momtrends.blogspot.com/2009/05/friday-feasts.html
My computer recently “helped” purge all my files by having a major crash, so for the moment, I am clutter-free…sadly.
Great ideas, though!
These are all VERY important…especially the back up thing! I learned that the hard way this week.
these are awesome tips! Thank you for sharing these! I’m off to do some decluttering!
I am just really starting with my digital camera love it and these tips will help keep me organized
I also posted a tackle it tuesday on my blog here is the link http://shopannies.blogspot.com/2009/05/focus-friday_14.html
I too am facing a digital overload. Will have to wait for the holidays to offload on that. 🙂
There are some great ideas and tips here. Thanks!
Great post! Thanks for hosting!
~Liz
I definitely have digital overload!! That might have to be a future tackle for me once I get through my big reorganizing tackle!! Great information!
Oh I so need to do this myself. I finally went through my e-mail inboxes today and dealt with a lot of things (some of which had sat for way too long), but like everything else right now my digital life is way too full of clutter. Sigh. Thanks for the wonderful tips – I’ll be putting them to good use! 🙂
I suspect that I need that tatooed on my forehead but life is tricky if you share your computer with several [many ] other individuals!
Cheers
This is a tackle I really need help with. My electronic data is a mess — literally years of unfiled emails and don’t even get me started on the state of my digital photos!
I so need to do this. Thanks for taking the time to list all the things we should do. I keep thinking about it but keep putting it off because it just seems like a hassle. But having to search for emails or documents is probably a much bigger hassle.