Digital Clutter
It’s not just our homes that need a good declutter every now and then, we also need to clear the digital clutter too! With our devices having increased storage space it is becoming easier to store digital clutter all over the place.
Emails, photos, documents, and of course social media.
The amount of globally stored data is predicted to reach 2142 Zettabytes by 2050. To give you some context a Zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, and every byte stored means electricity and water used by data centres.
When’s the best time to clear the digital clutter? Sunday night when there’s rubbish on the TV!
Haha, kidding – you are probably busy preparing for the week ahead.
A really great time to declutter is if you are planning to replace your laptop or tablet – do you really want to just copy everything straight over onto your shiny new device?
Or sometimes we are just forced to when “Computer Says No” because it has run out of storage space– this has happened to me in the past when I was trying to install a new software update.
Storing your digital clutter in the cloud
In principle storing all your photos and important docs in the cloud sounds like a good idea, but it’s another space where digital clutter can lurk and can be forgotten.
Did you know there’s a cost to storing things in the cloud? It's not just limited to the subscription fee you might pay monthly, but there's an environmental cost too.
The cloud (or Data Centres) use electricity 24/7 – and yes some might use green energy to run, but not all do. It’s been estimated Data Centres are responsible for up to 3% of global energy consumption, and it’s no coincidence that almost half of all CO2 emissions have happened in the last 30 years, the age of the digital revolution.
Just imagine the difference it would make if we all deleted a few documents or emails from the cloud!
Recent research estimated that each sent email can emit up to 4g CO2. When you think about the number of emails sent each day it really adds up! If you want to learn more about the cost of email/text messages take a look at 8 Billion Trees and try their calculator, I was genuinely shocked and I think you will be too.
Ideas to get your personal email under control
Now I’ve got you thinking about the environmental cost of storing and sending emails, now let’s look at the types of emails you receive. There are newsletters and special offers, bill reminders, appointment reminders, hobbies and more.
Have you noticed every time you buy something now, you’re asked for your email to join their loyalty programme or to receive your receipt. You hand over your email and then somehow the newsletters magically start arriving.
If you start getting overwhelmed with all these additional emails, here are 3 ideas you can try.
Login to your profile on the businesses website and update your mailing preferences.
Set up a room in your mailbox and send the newsletters straight to the bin! They won’t be taking uproom in your inbox and you can check your bin at a time.
And of course, the ultimate way of stopping emails – unsubscribe.
But what about the rest of the stuff that comes into your inbox, that you want to keep?
You can set up email folders for important emails to be sorted into and that way you can always find what you’re looking for. For example, for important bills, you can set up rules to automatically move emails into their specific folder, then you can check at your leisure.
Sorting and storing your digital documents
What about documents? Do you have multiple versions of your CV saved ‘just in case’?
Are they on your desktop, your documents folder… or even in your downloads folder? Or are they spread across your laptop/tablet, cloud storage or external hard drive.
So how do you get started sorting all the digital clutter documents out?
A great way to get organised is to grab some post it notes – look at your documents and figure out what kind of files you have, write a post-it note for each type. For example, Insurance, Personal Correspondence, Household Bills or TV License.
Once you have finished you will have quite a few post-it notes, and you can sort them into categories, this will help you build your own personalised filing system ready to set up folders and move documents around.
For bills, if you can access them online do you really need all the downloaded copies? Maybe just keep the most recent so you have access to the contact details and account number, and print out a hard copy as a back up.
And then there is the downloads folder, I recommend setting a reminder in your calendar once a month to sort through and delete any downloaded files you no longer need, it's amazing how quickly things can accumulate.
Apps
Aaah don’t we all love trying out a new app! But once again it adds to your digital clutter. Once you are done testing it out do you delete it, or keep it hanging around?
How do you categorise apps on your phone? I have seen a few different systems, categorised by colour, A-Z or sorted into folders with categories, such as, shopping, travel or entertainment.
If you find those little notification messages hard to resist there are a couple of tips and tricks to managing them:
Turn your notifications off in settings
Put social media apps on the last ‘page’ on your phone so you can’t see those enticing little red notification buttons popping up during the day.
Social Media
Do you have old social media accounts you no longer use? Do you really need to be on all those social media platforms? Do you need the apps on your smart phone?
These things take up space in our mind, so for the sake of your mental health and your time, give yourself permission to really think about how you’re using social media and whether it’s impacting on other things you would like to be doing instead!
How about setting aside time to close those no-longer needed social media accounts and using the settings on your smartphone to give you a digital ‘time out’.
During lockdown the number of Facebook groups exploded to support us all through that time. Are you still active in those groups? If not, it’s time to look at the groups you joined and decide if you still need them.
AI
A whole new category of Digital Clutter! If you're using AI to generate ideas have you thought about what this actually means. Making your day easier? No Doubt. Environmental impact - Yes - see above re: Data Centres. AI Demand = Data Centre Growth which means a surge in demand for electricity and water. But once you've finished with your AI query, what do you do with the results? Do you leave them sitting in your account (taking up space in a Data Centre) or do you move the results to a document on your laptop and delete the query?
Decluttering Photos
As with all things decluttering, I’ve left the most sentimental category to the end! We can take the same photo repeatedly, but do you ever delete the duplicates?
With software getting smarter and smarter, and your phone with certain settings enabled, it can face match and apply a location, taking a lot of the hard work out of categorising photos.
It is time consuming working through which to keep and which to delete, but the space it can free up –in your head and your storage system, is worth the effort.
Digital decluttering can take up as much time as physical decluttering, and as with your physical decluttering it does take continued time and maintenance. But what you end up with is a more organised, less distracted, and liberated version of yourself with more headspace for fun!
To help tackle digital clutter I’ve created a Declutter-along co-working session specifically to work through digital clutter you can find out more information here
Sources:
https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-since-1751-emitted-in-the-last-30-years
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecological-footprint-calculators/
