Last Updated on November 6, 2024

Doing a digital declutter is as essential as decluttering our physical spaces, as it allows us to feel more in control of our digital lives, which can take up as much time, and in some cases more time, than our offline lives.

If you’re currently feeling overwhelmed by the amount of clutter on your devices, and you’d like to make your digital life simpler, then here are 8 digital declutter steps that you can try.

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

The first thing you should tackle when undertaking a digital declutter is to better manage the documents you have on your computer.

The first thing to do when doing this is to go through all the documents on your computer and delete documents that you no longer need, and even delete those documents that you think you may need at some point, because chances are if you haven’t opened it in some time, you’re not going to.

After you’ve deleted documents, create folders for the documents that you have left, and name them in ways that make sense to you, and if needed, create folders within folders.

For example, you may decide to create a folder called home projects where you store everything related to your home. Within this folder you may have another folder called kitchen where you store all kitchen related documents, another called meal plans where you store all grocery related documents, another called holiday plans where you store all documents relating to family trips or school holiday information etc.

Folders allow you to keep your documents tidy, and makes searching for documents easier.

If you have a lot of documents that you need to manage then consider doing this digital declutter step in batches, so maybe you will do one type of folder one day, a couple the next, or one folder a week, this will mean that you don’t loose motivation to keep going.

Once you’ve completed this digital declutter step, make sure you back up all your documents to an external drive or an online storage system, such as Dropbox or Google Cloud so if anything happens to your computer you wont loose anything.

As an extra step, you can also do the same for your downloads folder, delete documents and file the rest away.

CLEAN UP YOUR PHOTOS AND VIDEOS

Another digital declutter step that may take a long time, but is definitely worth doing because it impacts your device’s storage space, is to clean up your photos and videos.

The first step in cleaning up your photos and videos is to go through all of them, and just like you did with your documents, delete photos and videos that you don’t want to keep.

After you’ve done that it’s time to make folders and move photos and videos from the phone screen they automatically go on, into the folders you want them to live in.

You may also like to have copies of the folders and the photos in them on your computer as well.

One last step that you can take in your photo and video digital declutter is to only keep photos on your phone for a certain time period, and once that period is up and they’ve been saved somewhere else, delete them from your phone.

I do this by only keeping photos that are for the current year on my phone. Once January 1 rolls around, I delete all the photos on my phone once they’ve been saved somewhere else, and start from scratch, moving photos to relevant folders every week.

TACKLE YOUR INBOX

Emails can build up fast, and before we know it our inbox is full and overwhelming, which means we just shut it down and vow to tackle it another time.

If you’d like to get a handle on your inbox, a great way to start is to group emails in your inbox by sender, then bulk archive or delete emails from senders you don’t want to respond to.

After you’ve done that, create folders for the emails you want to keep, and once you’ve read or responded to an email, move it to one of these folders. Make sure you do this each time you open your inbox.

Another great tip is to unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer want, or see if there’s an option on the bottom of the newsletter to receive the newsletter less often, and if not, set up a filter so the newsletter goes into a folder and not your inbox, so you can read it when you have more time.

HAVE A CLOSE LOOK AT YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE

If you would like to decrease the amount of time you spend on social media, then it’s worthwhile looking at the accounts you follow and deciding whether or not you still want to follow them.

If for any reason you don’t want to follow an account anymore, for example if the account’s producing content you’re not interested in anymore, or makes you feel bad in anyway, you can delete them or if you’d prefer you can mute them so you don’t see what they post any longer.

By doing this you are lessening the number of accounts you see whenever you spend time on social media, which means you’ll be spending less time scrolling, and you’ll only be seeing accounts that you enjoy.

As an extra step, you may even decide to remove all your social media accounts from your phone, and only have them on your computer, so you can only access them at certain times.

LOOK AT YOUR APPS

A digital declutter activity that’s often forgotten about is to look at your apps and if you haven’t used one for a long time, or even used it at all delete it.

Once you’ve deleted all the apps you no longer want, create folders for the remaining ones, so your screen is tidier.

For example, travel apps can go into a folder called travel, banking apps in a folder called banking etc.

An extra step here could also be turning off app notifications that aren’t essential to your productivity levels so you don’t waste time when on your phone. So in this instance, you may only have notifications turned on for emails and calendar reminders.

ORGANISE YOUR DESKTOP

Often our desktops can become the dumping ground for documents we don’t know where to store, screenshots of random things, and any number of other things we don’t know what to do with, which as well as looking untidy, create mental clutter as soon as we turn our computer on.

A great way to do a digital declutter on your desktop is to delete anything you don’t need, file away what you do, and then before you turn your computer off every time you use it make sure anything you put on your desktop is taken care of.

HAVE SOME PHONE FREE TIME

Taking time away from your phone whenever you feel the need to is a great way to spend time doing the things you love, like reading, listening to podcasts, or even decluttering other areas of your life.

If you’d like to have some phone free time, then maybe as a start try leaving your phone off for an hour in the morning so you can start the day digital free.

Or, you may decide to leave your phone in another room when it’s charging, or set certain times throughout the day that you use your phone to scroll social media, watch YouTube, or do things that aren’t work related.

REGULARLY DO A DIGITAL DECLUTTER

Regularly doing a digital declutter by doing some of the steps listed here will ensure your digital life doesn’t become overwhelming and out of control again.

The best way to make sure you stay on top of your digital life is to schedule time to do these steps on a weekly or monthly basis.

Once you’ve done your digital declutter, don’t forget to empty your trash bin for the work you’ve done on your computer, and enjoy the sense of relief you’ll feel once you see that it’s empty.

I hope you feel inspired to do a digital declutter and take control of your digital life.

If you are feeling inspired, what step do you think you’ll do first?
I’d love to hear about it in the comments.