It’s hard to believe that we’re already over halfway through the year! Six full months of hard word, communication, and a new ideas. That also means six months of emails, links, files, photos, videos, and more hanging around on your computer. 

And even if you’re someone who started with an organized digital space in January, it’s time to take a look back at the last 6 months of clutter you might have accumulated without realizing. The three areas we see the most mess are inboxes, desktops, and photo apps, so today we’re tackling the mid-year digital declutter before the mad rush of Fall hits us with back-to-school and the holidays.

Let’s go!

If you’re working on your computer all day long, hopping in and out of inboxes, the mess can often go overlooked for the sake of saving time. But after several months that mess and disarray might end up costing you more time. So instead of searching through opened emails and piles of spam, start here:

Make folders:

• Make folders for everything and everyone. For family things (maybe even one folder per family member if you have kids with busy extracurricular and school schedules), for anything work related, for doctors office communications, for recurring newsletters, and for any other regular email. If it has a home, you’ll know where to find it.
• It’s also helpful to make an “unsubscribe” folder so you can easily sort emails that need to be unsubscribed from into the same place.

Sort and set up rules:

• As you go through everything that has built up in your inbox, start moving it into your new folders.
• If you expect to get more emails from this sender, consider making a rule that their emails will always file into a specific folder.
• However, if out of sight means out of mind, you probably want to continue manually filing your emails after reading them so that nothing gets overlooked.

Outsource:

• Work with a virtual assistant to keep up with the influx of emails you’re getting on a daily basis.
• They can do the initial heavy duty inbox sweep before handling daily maintenance.
• You can also task them with unsubscribing to any emails you move to the “unsubscribe” folder throughout the week. 

Similar to an out of control inbox, it’s easy to let files pile up on your computer when work and life get busy. Here are a few of the ways we suggest tackling the clutter and continuing to keep it under control:

• Keep an active folder for the current year. This way you know where all of your current projects, files, and materials are at all times.
• Delete any junk or duplicates. Schedule a time each week to go through your downloads folder to rename and move anything that needs to be saved or delete anything that belongs in the trash folder.
• Name everything. It’s easy to lose files when their name has nothing to do with their purpose, or worse, they’re labeled by default as “Untitled 5”.
• If you need to store lots of large files, like photos, consider moving them to the cloud, a dropbox account, or an external hard drive.

One area of your tech that probably gets overlooked and extra cluttered is your camera roll. Between regular photos, random screenshots, and photos that other people send to you, it adds up fast. Here are some ways to pare down your photo album and keep it more organized going forward:

• Combine duplicates. This is easy if you have an iPhone or MacBook because of the built-in feature (Photos app→ Collections → Utilities → Duplicates → Select “Merge”)
• Delete daily: search the day’s date in your photo app and make a habit of going through and deleting anything you no longer want in your phone. Pro tip: set an alarm each day for a time you know you’ll be able to go through them. This also ends up being a fun walk down your memories from years past.
• Check out these tips to organize your camera roll from the experts at Artifact Uprising.

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So if you’ve been looking for some ways to spruce up your digital space, this is your sign to tackle your inbox, files, and photos. Especially before the back to school madness begins this Fall.

And, as always, if you need help with any of these tasks, our team of virtual assistants is ready to tackle your to-do list.