Oh man, talk about overwhelming. If you are anything like me, you have a ton of random things you’ve uploaded to the cloud or Google Drive. Some of these things are one-time use, and others you need to be able to find again, and quickly. I recently went about organising and decluttering my digital life, and here are my top tips to get you started now, before you begin downloading more stuff. I am an Android gal, so my first stop was my Google Drive.
Google Drive
Folders are a girl’s best friend. Yes, they are. Create a few simple ones to begin with. One with each of your kids’ names, pets, and partner. Because let’s face it, you are probably a lot better organised than he is anyway. One labelled as your town or “house” for all those bills and miscellaneous things that you might not yet have a name for. Better yet, create a folder called Miscellaneous, Junk, or Crap, and use it to store all the random one-time downloads.
Renaming
Most of the time, especially if it’s not that important, we tend to save things as is and don’t bother changing the name. This is a habit we need to get out of. When you download something, take a moment to look it over and name it accordingly. Depending on what the download or document is, adding the date to it will be just as important as changing the name.
Reorganizing
Now this might seem daunting, but it’s about making good habits stick. I suggest finding a time where you would normally be doomscrolling anyway, so you can make it a little more routine, at least until you have gotten everything sorted. Choose a time before bed, or when your partner is driving. Do I really need to scroll aimlessly for 30 minutes? No, I don’t. That’s a 30-minute time period I can devote to clicking through each of my documents, one by one, to figure out what they are and where they belong.
Emails
Are you one of those people who don’t look at their emails, and that unread number just piles up? We can’t be friends. As someone who is very type A, I need to check all my emails, or if it’s crap, then it can go unread into the bin. I hate that we keep getting asked to enter our email when we use Wi-Fi or when we want to get a discount on something, and we give our email. Creating a crappy separate email for just that occasion might be a good idea (If you can remember all the login details!) Make a habit of going back through and unsubscribing as soon as you’ve received your discount to stop the buildup of useless emails.
Apps
Again, I am sure we are all guilty of downloading an app or two, or three, that we no longer use. So take that 30-minute doom scroll before bed and turn it into an app cull. You only need to do this once. If you don’t use it, delete it. If you haven’t used it in the last month, you probably won’t use it again. Barring anything for official documents, and use of course. That dog training app, be real, you didn’t really use it. The sign language app? Unless you are using it every day, it can go. Go for a Marie Kondo vibe. Does it bring you joy? Nope, delete. Now the hard part is staying in the right mindset, not to download a bunch of useless apps again. Either that, or you keep going through the cycle of checking things out every month or so, making sure you stay organised and on top of things.
Photos
The final digital organisation that I need to do. Do you have old photos that you want to keep? You know, from before the age of Google Drive and clouds. Take pics and add them, or upload your digital pics to the cloud and follow the previous advice about folders. That, for me, is the easy part. The harder part is somehow organising them on my phone so I can access them quickly and easily. You wanna see pics from my wedding? Here they are, you wanna see Xmas pics of the kids, Ta-da! Labelled and foldered. Any volunteers to help? Anyone? Ah, I’ll get there one day.
