October 3 - Identify Your Goals for Digital Information

DIGITAL DECLUTTER SERIES
Welcome to the digital declutter mini-course within your Year of Decluttering!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be focusing on digital decluttering – from laptops to tablets and smartphones. You’ll tame your emails, get control of photos, put files into folders, and figure out whether you really want to keep everything or declutter and curate your information.

Because digital information doesn’t take up physical space it’s easy to overlook this invisible clutter. However, we spend so much time on different devices, for work and personal reasons, that we can end up feeling just as overwhelmed looking at digital files lined up across our screens as we would looking at boxes of paper stacked in the corner of a room.
With so much digital information stored on our devices, I’ll return to some topics, like email and photos, on more than one occasion.

I’d suggest setting a timer when you sit down for a digital declutter, so you don’t mentally exhaust yourself trying to do too much in a day. I’ll still try to keep tasks to 15-30-minutes but depending on the organizing systems you use (or don’t have) for your digital information, tasks could take much longer (which is why I’ll return to some areas multiple times).

You may be facing the equivalent of thousands of pages of emails, PDFs, and documents – plus photos, digital books, bookmarked webpages, address books, and social media-related information.

Today, consider what your goal is for getting a handle on your digital information. What types of files do you often return to that you wish were better organized? What areas are most overwhelming?