Beyond the Home: How to Organize Your Digital Footprint
My favorite thing about decluttering and organizing is that it helps me feel calmer and more able to focus on other things that are important to me. But what about our digital homes? We spend so much time in our digital spaces that they feel like an extension of our physical homes. They deserve the same attention and care to make them welcoming places for us to get work done or enjoy ourselves. Here are a few things I do to clean up my digital footprint so my mental state feels cleaned up as well.
Passwords: For some reason, I dragged my feet on signing up for a password manager for years. But hands down the BEST thing I did in 2020 (other than give birth to my son, natch) was sign up for 1password.com. I implore you to follow suit immediately. Literally, stop reading this post right now and DO IT! Why?
All of your passwords are stored in one place, not on a collection of post-its, old receipts, and envelope scraps.
You only need to remember ONE master password. ONE! When you have to sign into anything, you just log into your password manager via the website or a mobile app, copy and paste, and you’re done.
The passwords auto-generated by your password manager will be approximately one million times better than the one you came up with 10 years ago and have been making variations on ever since.
The peace of mind knowing that your passwords, and therefore your accounts, are safe is priceless.
Email: I get it--email these days is rough. There’s so much mail, and usually only a handful of emails are really worth the read. Here’s a few tips for keeping your inbox in shape:
Evaluate what you are actually reading, and unsubscribe from the rest. Do you find yourself deleting the same messages over and over again? Next time you find yourself deleting emails from that same sender, take the extra step and click unsubscribe. I guarantee you won’t miss them.
Don’t sign up for notifications from all of your social platforms. Social media is designed to be addictive (which is a whooooole other topic, but let’s just leave that right there for now…), so I promise you don’t need an email notification to know someone liked your photo or messaged you.
Create an email filing system that has broad category assignments. The more minute your filing system, the less likely you are to use it, and the more likely you are to have an overflowing, chaotic inbox.
Your [Digital] Desktop: Between all the screenshots, a handful of return shipping labels, and a random selection of downloaded documents you didn’t know what to do with, your computer desktop can be a pretty hairy place. But staring at all that clutter day in and day out can take a toll on your stress level. Keep the mess to a minimum at your virtual home base with a couple of easy tips:
Periodically delete anything you no longer need. Since the desktop tends to hold documents saved on the fly, many become obsolete after a short time and can be deleted.
If you find yourself continuing to save the same type of document to your desktop, just create the appropriate folders to house them--for example, “Recipes” or “Photos”--and determine whether you want to continue saving these collections here or at another location on your computer or cloud storage.
I hope reading these digital organizing tips has already started to calm the whirring in your brain. (And seriously, get that password manager, stat!)