We clean our rooms; we clean our drawers and we throw away stuff we donāt need, but digitally we donāt seem to bother.
If our digital life was a room, the room would be filled with 10000+ unread emails, old social media accounts we donāt use anymore and apps that we havenāt used in months but we keep it ājust in caseā.
So, hereās a little guide I put together to help you clean this mess up! š¤
Scroll through your phone and find apps that you donāt use and delete them, then find apps that you donāt feel like give you any value or wastes your time and delete them.
On Android, there are apps that can help you do this (arguably, you could say this is a āJust In Caseā app). My preferred one is Unused App Remover, I like this app because it has no-thrills and it just gets the job done.
Any apps that you canāt delete, try and disable or hide them from your phone.
For this, Iād recommend youād upload all your photos onto cloud storage so youād be able to access them anywhere.
If youāre not a huge privacy geek like me and you really like the Google Eco-system, then Iād recommend Google Photos. It has unlimited photo storage (albeit, kinda compressed but you really canāt see the difference) and it has useful features such as facial recognition which will automatically group photos according to who is in the photo.
. [UPDATED 30/12/2020: Google is to discontinue free unlimited photos in March, there arenāt any free photo alternatives.] .
(Not my image)
Other alternatives are uploading all your photos to a traditional cloud storage platform such as Dropbox or just using Apple iCloud, which is already quite integrated with iOS.
Now, scroll through your photos and delete duplicate images, weird screenshots you donāt need or random accidental selfies youāve taken.
I never really paid attention to notifications before. I used to just let them build up, but what Iāve found out is that, not only unnecessary notifications look really untidy, but they make you become less productive. Letās fix that!
On Android
This may vary between devices due to Android versions and Android skins.
Go into Settings
Click Apps and Notifications
Click āNotificationsā
Click āSee all from last 7 daysā
Disable the ones you donāt click on or need
ON iOS (iphones)
This may vary between each iOS
Go into Settings
Click āNotificationsā
Click on the apps you get unnecessary notifications from
Hide them into the notification center or disable them completely
My computer files are the most messiest dump of ādigital wasteā you will probably ever see. Full of images, .exe files and a lot of After Effects project files. Youāll probably be able to relate to an extent.
One step would be to put all your computer files on Cloud Storage, and using a sync client to integrate it with your File Explorer/Finder. The most popular Cloud Storage providers, such as Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud (integrated into MacOS) should already have a sync client that you can use.
After doing this, you should re-evaluate all the files you have on your computer and think about whether or not you should move them onto cloud storage or delete them.
Iād then sort it all into folders that would act as little categories for all your files.
To do this I used MEGA, a privacy-first and encrypted Cloud Storage provider based in New Zealand that has plans that donāt break the bank and can be used on all devices.
This should remove all the clutter from your computer and should make it easier to navigate, not just on your computer but also on your mobile device.
This is probably by far the most embarrassing one, Iām saying that from experience. š
Take a trip back into memory lane and scroll through your Twitter feed and delete the tweets you donāt want anyone to see.
If you donāt wanna go through all of that, there are tools like TweetDelete that are able to delete all tweets or certain tweets from a time period.
Facebook & Instagram
On Facebook, thereās a tool called āLimit Past Postsā which will hide your current and past timeline posts. To find this, itās in Settings > Privacy > Limit Past Posts. There are also Chrome extensions you can get like Social Book Post Manager, which can delete years worth of posts and images.
On Instagram, there are apps like Cleaner for Instagram which let you select how many photos you want deleted. If you want to keep your images, there is an archive button in the Instagram app.
This is the worst one.
My emails are mostly full of old email subscriptions I have never opened and loads of spam emails from companies that wanna give me āFREE SAMPLESā. Letās solve that!
Do anyone still believe these?
The most manual way of doing this is to just scroll through your emails and then delete/unsubscribe the emails that you donāt really open or bring value to you.
To do that, it would be really labor intensive and it would take a long time as I have so many unread emails. Fortunately, there are apps like Cleanfox that can let you do that!
The app allows you to unsubscribe to mailing lists quickly. Swipe left to delete these emails or swipe right to unsubscribe from them, There is a keep button in the center in case you want to keep that mailing list and that email.
It also shows information on the amount of CO2 you have saved by unsubscribing to these emails and the amount of times youāve opened emails from an individual mailing list.
Congratulations! Youāve successfully ācleaned your roomā. You should receive less spam emails, less notifications and less burden to your online footprint, vital in a time where technology is becoming a bigger bigger part of our lives.
Let's keep in touch š