How to declutter your digital environment
Our digital lives take up less physical space than our real lives - but their affect on our mental clutter and mental health is not to be underestimated.
You can’t see it… but you can feel it!
I am making an effort to reduce time on screens after reading the book Digital Minimalism. I’ve bought myself a traditional alarm clock, and a landline telephone. I have a cupboard that locks, and around 8pm each night I lock all of our technology away. My son has been known to try and sneak back downstairs after lights out!
I’ve also set up Screen Time on my phone, so all the apps switch off anyway around 9pm, and then they don’t switch back on until 9am in the morning. That way I can have my morning cup of tea, and spend some time on my morning practice of gratitude and affirmations etc without disruptions. Through these changes I've managed to drastically reduce my screen time.
Here are some other tips and suggestions for decluttering your digital environment:
Apps - the book Digital Minimalism is great; it walks you through a digital detox and then you reintroduce only the apps that you use and serve a purpose. Go ahead and delete any apps that you don't use in the first instance.
Emails - I'm sure you're the same as me - I get a lot of emails and I probably delete a large proportion of them without even opening them. Go ahead and unsubscribe if this is you. There are also apps you can use to remove email subscriptions.
Files - I’ve been using Google Drive - which I love as I can access the files across multiple devices/computers. Key for me is to have the files all organised across folders rather than just being dumped in.
Photos - I had intended on sorting my photographs when I was on maternity leave before my son arrived… but he was born 7 weeks early and I didn’t get any time! He’s now 12 and I still haven’t completed it all.
There are apps that you can use to remove duplicate photos; this is where I started. I also printed photographs and bought myself some albums to store them. The kids love looking back over their baby photos; and I still love looking back on the photo albums of my childhood.
Social Media - Delete people that you follow that aren’t in alignment with your values. Your feed has been curated by you - make sure that it makes you feel good.
Have an intention when you go into these apps - what are you going in there to do? I use them for my businesses, and so typically I go in and post what I want to share, respond to comments and then I come out again.
