Digitally De-cluttering in 2011
We often make New Year’s resolutions that revolve around losing weight, exercising more, cleaning our house, giving more to charities, and building better relationships. Cleaning and organizing are often high on those lists of goals. But what about digital reorganization and cleaning? How can one tidy up one’s digital life and de-clutter? I’ve listed some of my personal tips to help get you started:
- Workspace : Start with your workspace first. Clean up those spaghetti cables, paperwork junk piles, and make sure you have both a shredder and a recycle bin easily accessible to your desk. For inspiration on creating a very enviable and well-organized workspace, check out this clip for inspiration. It is my dream home office!
- Desktop : Clean up your computer’s desktop (and if you have a Mac, your dock). Remove rarely used or unused icons. Not every program needs to have the associated icon on the desktop. Use folders to organize all of your files and downloads and do not store them on your desktop.
- Security : Make sure your anti virus software is up to date and that you regularly run scans on your system. If you have a Mac, you probably aren’t running anti virus software since they typically do not get viruses. Nevertheless, pay attention to what you download. Even a Mac can potentially let a sneaky virus in now and then. Download only from reputable websites.
- Assets : Consolidate your music, documents, photos, and other commonly used files and back up your data. There are many options on the market, both free or for purchase to organize and back up your important files. From online options such as the Google Docs documentation creation and storage application to purchasing your own additional external drive for data storage, the options are plenty.
At Sevenforty, we aim for a simple digital life. We only use the applications that we truly need for work or personal use. We believe in clean code and design to create streamlined end products. Many of us get overwhelmed with all of the nifty sounding digital solutions to our needs. Don’t I need that awesome time management application that allows me to send notes to my calendar planner software that then will create an email reminder and somehow file the note into a creative sounding digital filo-fax? Doesn’t this nifty idea make my digital life more productive? Probably not. You don’t need as much as you think you do.
Many software applications, while as interesting and promising as they sound, end up not being used after the novelty wears off and just take up space on our systems. If you require an hour or so a couple times a week to even use the app, you would do better to instead use those hours to read a book and relax. Remember – less is more!
Let’s start the New Year off right and take a moment to clean up our digital life. Make technology work for you, not you for it. Have a great new year from the team of Sevenforty!
