7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life

As our society continues the shift from analog to digital, the importance of digital organization increases. Most of us are used to the fact that in order to succeed at any endeavor, we need to organize our chaotic lives, including things like our home and office workspace. Without it, focus can be fleeting.

It's difficult to accomplish and achieve our goals when our workspaces and homes are filled with clutter. In fact, in a study conducted by researchers at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute entitled, "Interactions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex," it was determined that an increase in clutter leads to a decrease in our ability to focus.

Specifically, in scientific jargon, they stated that "Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system."

Similar to clutter in the physical realm, clutter in the digital realm has the same effect on our lives. When our digital lives are cluttered, meaning that our inboxes are crammed full with unopened or unanswered emails, our desktops are littered with images and documents with little to no relevancy or structure, and our folders and files are unorganized, focusing becomes far more difficult.

It goes without saying then, that if you want to achieve anything, whether it's a short-term goal or a long term one, you need to declutter your digital life, and not just your physical one. We spend a lot of time with our devices, so ensuring that we have a system in place will help us stay focused and on track with our daily activities is a crucial factor in our potential for increased productivity.

Overall, here are 7 important ways that you can declutter your digital life. It doesn't take too much effort. Just a little bit of conscious thought and action on a daily basis.

#1 -- Declutter Your Desktop

The perfect place to start with decluttering your digital life is on your desktop. The desktop is the hub of your digital life. It's where all things begin -- where you keep your apps and other important files you want to access quickly. The same thing applies to the home screen of your smartphone.

But, oftentimes, we allow the desktop to become too cluttered. And the perfect way to declutter it is to use one simple strategy. All you have to do is create one folder and move everything from your desktop into that folder. Call the folder "misc," short for miscellaneous, or anything else you want.

Then, over time, as you use or access the items in that folder, move them to your desktop. After 3 months, it will be easy to determine which files or apps are accessed often enough to remain on your desktop, and which ones simply don't need to be there. Then, archive or catalog the ones that are left in the misc folder into a cleanly-organized folder structure.

If you have images and documents, create folders that would include a structure like this:
Year > Category > Subject. So, you might have something like 2016 > Personal Files > Taxes, or 2016 > Work Files > Customers. Create a structure that will help you keep things organized and clean.

#2 -- Zero Out Your Inbox Every Day

A big part of our digital clutter is our email inboxes. Whatever email service you use, a cluttered inbox will add to the inability to focus. it's similar to having a mailbox at home sitting full with unpaid bills and other unopened items. While you might not realize it, that creates a mental strain, subconsciously limiting your ability to focus on other tasks.

The goal? Achieve inbox zero every day. But to get there, you first have to create a system for organization. If you find that you get too many unwanted emails, go through and unsubscribe from email lists that you no longer read anymore. Or, create a system of rules using online email providers such as Gmail to filter certain types of messages into certain folders with automated actions.

If you have thousands of messages sitting in your inbox with no particular organization, then it's high-time to use search filters to begin organizing them. Search for emails from certain organizations or people and begin placing them into an organized folder structure. Then, at the end of the day, ensure that you clear out your inbox so that every message is categorized or cataloged away into its respective folder.

Building this habit might be tough at the start. But, then again, all habits take time to implement. But, clearing out your inbox each day will take away some of that added mental stress that we don't even know exists in our minds, allowing us to focus more on the tasks at hand.

#3 -- Use External-Backup Systems

External-backup systems are a great way to help declutter your digital life while also improving the speed of your device. Head out to your nearest electronics retailer and purchase an external-backup device such as an SSD drive or other large external storage device.

When you move all of your critical work files to a fast external storage device, you help to speed up your device, and also keep all of your critical files in one place. This way, if your computer were to ever crash and your main hard drive was unrecoverable, you have an optional backup. Plus, you could simply unplug the drive and take it with you anywhere you go, helping to avoid the potential for data loss through theft.

To add to this, ensure that you sign-up for a cloud-storage system such as Dropbox or an Amazon or Google Drive where you can keep your external-backup system files synchronized to the cloud. This way, you're double-protected in case of any type of loss. This will help keep your mind at ease while also providing the organization necessary to partially declutter your digital life.

#4 -- Organize and Delete Social Media Contacts

A big part of our lives are spent on social media. From Facebook to Twitter and every other social media platform in between, we often turn to those avenues for news and information about what's going on in the world and with our friends.

However, oftentimes, we tend to have information overload. Either we're following too many people, have too many friends, or are just sifting through too much information. That information is distracting. And, unless we laser-focus our activities online, we'll be more likely to veer off course, moving in one tangent after another, not really taking the time to care about things like digital clutter.

To battle that, we need to delete irrelevant contacts and organize our social media lives so that they're more efficient and less cluttered with useless news and updates. Spend the time to go through your contacts and remove or unfollow the ones that you're no longer in touch with or that are cramming up your newsfeed.

#5 -- Systemize Your Bookmarks

It's easy to allow our bookmarks to spiral out of control by bookmarking pages often, but failing to keep them organized can lend itself to a cluttered digital space. Taking the time to systemize your bookmarks isn't too difficult. Like anything else, it just requires a bit of focus and a small amount of time. All it takes is 15 minutes.

Take your smartphone or any other device with a timer and set it to 15 minutes. Once you start the timer, begin systemizing your bookmarks. Create categories, and catalog the ones used less often into folders, leaving the primary ones in the main folder. You could also use the desktop-organizing method of piling them all into one folder, then pulling out the ones you click on often, into the main folder.

At the end of the 15 minutes, you can decide whether to keep going or stop. But at least give yourself 15 minutes. Thats all it takes. And if you quickly finish your bookmarks, spend the rest of the 15 minutes organizing files and applications until the time is up.

#6 -- Limit Your Open Browser Windows & Tabs

If you're anything like the next person, then you're a multitasker. I don't blame you because so am I. But, sometimes I catch myself with 10 or more tabs open, shaking my head in bewilderment and wondering why I tend to do just that. While having 10, or even 20, tabs open isn't the end of the world, it does add to digital clutter, decreasing your ability to focus.

If you're using multiple browsers with multiple tabs open in each, then it's even worse. Focus on having a maximum of 3 or 4 tabs open at all times, no more. Close out anything else and make a habit of doing that often.

This way, you're focused and not jumping all over the place to sites that might include social media and news, helping lend to the level of noise and distractions that we all tend to face in any given day.

#7 -- Create an Image and Video Organization System

Images and videos are a huge part of our lives. With the prevalence of smartphones and smart-everything devices, our ability to take photos and video at any moment is readily available to us. However, with all that content comes a bit of an organizational nightmare. How are we supposed to keep all of that organized and cataloged?

For the most part, we simply dump everything into one folder. But over time, that folder balloons and we really have no way of sifting and organizing through it unless we decide to spend days or weeks at it. Instead, it's important to keep the habit of cataloging your images and videos as they hit your computer. Leverage your external-backup drive or cloud-storage system to keep things organized.

In the future, it's likely that we'll have AI-based systems for organizing all of our photos. We're certainly on our way there. But until that day, we need to keep things organized on a daily basis so that we can declutter our digital lives and stay focused on our goals.