Good morning! Today’s challenge is going to be a little different than the others we’ve had in this series but is still relevant to decluttering. Today’s challenge is decluttering your computer, Ipad, tablet, cell phone, or whatever electronic device you use! I’d like you to spend 30 minutes to an hour working on this project. Depending on the steps you do, it can make your computer faster and will definitely help you be more organized.
I’m sure you may be thinking, “Why would I need to do that?” Here are some ways that you can declutter your computer:
- Declutter your email. This may not be a problem for you, but it is definitely a problem for me! My personal inbox has 170 emails that I haven’t read in it right now. (It’s actually been way higher than that before, but I’ve gotten better at cleaning out before it gets to that!) There are 3 parts to this.
The first is deleting the things you no longer need. (I like to create folders in Gmail to organize what I do want to keep. It moves them out of the inbox but I have them if I need them).
The second part of decluttering your email is going through and looking to see who you are getting your emails from and if you need to be receiving them at all. Have you signed up for updates from websites, blogs, or companies that you no longer wish to receive? (Hopefully not mine!) I get so many emails from stores with coupons and notifications of sales that I only shop at once a year that it drives me crazy. I will be spending some time unsubscribing today from these. Each time my phone alerts me to a new email and I look to see who it’s from, I’m wasting seconds of my day. By unsubscribing to the unimportant, I can focus on more important things such as my family.
The third part is don’t forget to empty your email spam!
- Change your notifications tab on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest if you are getting too many emails about people following you, etc.
- Have you registered your home phone for the National Do Not Call Registry? If you haven’t spend 2 minutes and go to donotcall.gov and sign up! When we did this our telemarketing calls decreased significantly.
- Clean up your desktop. Mine is a hot mess right now. It’s full of blog ideas, pictures, and other documents that need organized! Create some new folders to organize your documents and keep things simple for yourself.
- Can you delete some programs that you no longer use?
- Can you clean out old contacts which you no longer need? (This is true on your cell phone as well!)
- Can you clean out old music, ebooks, or movies that you no longer need that you have downloaded?
- Do you have photos that need cleaned up? Can you organize them, back them up, and delete the duplicates?
- Go through your documents and delete what you no longer need.
- Have you deleted your cookies and internet temporary files lately?
- Go through your bookmarks and favorites. Can you organize what you have and delete what you no longer need?
- Don’t forget to empty your recycling bin!
- When you are finished can you back up all of your data? My awesome mother-in-law gave us a Clickfree 1 TB Portable Hard Drive with backup for Christmas. I am really thinking this is going to make my life easier in the backing-up the computer department!
I hope you will be able to join in today! Let me know how decluttering your computer goes in the comments!
Here are the previous challenges in this series:
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