Today, it is more than just having a clean home or workspace or an organised work plan; it’s actually about organising your whole life to achieve more happiness and create more positivity.
What’s more, aside from your home, school/office, and businesses, you can also apply the art of decluttering to your digital life.
Are your social media feeds or email feed filled with posts or messages that are quite useless? Are you constantly bothered by annoying notifications?
Do you find it hard searching for posts or emails you actually care about in the sea of posts, messages, and selfies by people you hardly know?
You are not alone in this state of modern-age misery! But take heart, because the art of decluttering is one way to solve this problem.
Thankfully, there’s no need to get rid of your current accounts. Emailing companies and social media website developers have provided ways for us to easily declutter our profiles and newsfeeds.
Here are some steps you can take to declutter your digital life.
Social media accounts
• Possible problems: The common problem among social media website users is having too many people on their friends list; while it does look nice in your profile to have a thousand friends, it can get annoying when you are skimming through your feed.
Having these many friends means having to see posts of a thousand people on your feed. You also probably have that one social media friend you cannot delete – maybe a relative or your boss – who posts things you find irritating.
• What you can do: Social media websites like Facebook provide two options: you can either unfriend these people or unfollow them.
The first option is for “friends” whose posts you don’t really care about and “friends” you hardly ever talk to.
In short, unfriend those who are simply there to add up to your friend count and feed space.
What about unfollowing? Unfollowing someone means he/she is still your friend on Facebook, but you will no longer see this person’s posts on your news feed.
This is what you do to those whose posts you do not want to see but cannot remove from your friend list either.
What makes this feature perfect is that others have no way to see who you unfollowed. If you unfriend someone, the other person would know if he/she sees you are no longer on his/her friend list.
Your phone
• Possible problems: Many of us download different apps on our smartphones whether for entertainment, budgeting, organising, communication, and more. What’s more, taking photos is just too easy when the phone’s right in your pocket.
However, if you don’t give up this habit, you’ll turn your smartphone into a digital junkyard. At some point, you will no longer be able to use it with ease. It’s performance will start to slow down, and it will get difficult to look for things.
• What you can do: First, learn to file. Instead of leaving those apps scattered around your screen, organise them into folders according to their purpose. It can be as simple as “Utilities”, “Games”, “Music”, “Social Media”, and “Photos”.
Check your galleries. Put your photos in folders. Instead of having mp3’s of random songs by random artists, file them by artiste, album, or genre, making it super easy to look for a particular song.
Second, learn to let go. Uninstall apps you no longer use. After all, it’s so easy downloading the app again should the need arise.
Delete photos you no longer need. If you really need the space, you can upload your photos to social media websites, or if you don’t wish to make them public, opt for free image hosting.
Websites like Photobucket or Dropbox offers an option to keep your uploaded files private. Rather than keeping music files on your phone, you may also opt to use apps like Spotify instead.
Decluttering your inbox
• Possible Problems: Do your emails continue to pile up to the point you can barely find those you actually need?
• What you can do: The common mistake when we receive emails, is that we read them, then leave them there. What many do not know is that there are three options in handling emails you have already read.
Either immediately respond to the email, store it in a folder, or trash it. Make it a habit to do one of these three things to all emails you receive. It may be a bit of a hassle, but you should start by clearing out and organising past emails that tend to pile up.
This article first appeared in thenewsavvy.com
The New Savvy is Asia’s leading financial, investments and career platform for women. Our bold vision is to empower 100 million women to achieve financial happiness. We deliver high-quality content through conferences, e-learning platforms, personal finance apps and e-commerce stores.