5 ways to digitally declutter
If you’ve been following me on social media lately you’ll know I’ve been taking stock of my life and making some super important changes. These have been centred around embracing slower living, not trying to promise or do too much, and get back a bit of balance in my life.
I’ve been tuning into a few podcasts to learn about how to slow my life down, and it’s helped immensely but nothing that I could find was really teaching me how to slow down and declutter my digital life. So true to form for me, I just decided to create it myself.
Here’s my top 5 tips on decluttering your digital life.
1. Think long and hard about your devices. Do you really need a phone and a tablet and a laptop and a smart watch?? Figure what’s most valuable to your life and try to just use that. We are becoming so conditioned to just move our attention from screen to screen!
2.Timing is everything. Be aware of how much time you’re spending on your devices and if necessary limit your usage. I was finding myself spending upwards of 6 hours a day some days on my phone/laptop, by the end of the day I felt frazzled, sore-eyed, and exhausted. I have just started implementing a 1-for-1 swap each day; I swap an hour of screen time for an hour or reading an actual book. It’s done wonders for my restlessness and frustration of circling through the same 4 apps day in day out!
3. Time for a digital cull! I have 6,000 photos on my phone. 6 THOUSAND. I would say roughly 1,000 are of actual value to me, the rest are things like screenshots, half blurry photos, 8 photos of almost the exact same thing when I’ve been trying to get that “perfect shot”. So I’ve started deleting out 100 photos a day. Look, it’s going to take me a long time to get down to a reasonable number, but slow is better than nothing. Once I have narrowed down to just the photos I want and need, I’ll transfer them to the computer and off my phone completely.
4. App happy. We’re on a roll now guys, time to get rid of all those useless apps you never use or social media apps that you always think you’re going to get around to. My tip is to focus on your one or two main forms of social media that you’re present on and engaged in and delete the rest. Contrary to what social tells you and the FOMO phenomenon you don’t actually NEED to be on Facebook AND Instagram AND Twitter AND snapchat AND Pinterest AND Tumblr AND LinkedIn. Me? I’m an Instagram and Facebook girl and that’s exhausting enough!
5. And lastly, the dreaded inbox, you might have caught it on my story the other day but if not, get acquainted with http://unroll.me – it will make your life a whole lot simpler, a whole lot quicker. If you’re anything like me you constantly get emails from every which website even though you didn’t subscribe and you leave the emails unread until you “get around to reading them” which is never, so before you know it you’ve for 500 unread emails. Start by getting rid of all your pointless subscriptions, and then go through and delete everything that’s not absolutely necessary to your emails. If there’s stuff there that you can categorise; create some new folders and organise everything into them!
Listen up guys, we have evolved so much as humans over the last 100 years, but the thing is we were never built or designed to be exposed to this much digital stimulus. If you’re feeling crappy about yourself, and how you can’t cope because of the burden or digital overwhelm you’re not alone and you’re actually NOT the problem! Take a deep breath, delete some pointless stuff out of your phone and your life and you’ll be amazed how much better you feel, and at the very least know that I’m in this with you!
G x