Is it time for a Digital declutter?
We humans seem to be natural accumulators. For the most of us, things have ways and means of entering our lives and somehow taking permanence, unless we are vigilant in not providing a home to all kinds of stuff. This also includes ideas which may at times begin to collect dust in minds, creating gorgeous cobwebs! It definitely includes digital files, words, images, audios up, videos and programs.
How often do your spring clean your closets, pantry and in general, your vital spaces and home?
How often do you go for a Digital purge and declutter?
I have to confess that I am much better at being minimal digitally than physically. I am also working at it, on both fronts, despite appearances!
Since I work a lot online, as well as with ideas processed on a pc, with images, audio files and videos, I have had to organise myself to undertake consistent, planned digital clean ups. I had to learn this the hard way, when my hard disk crashed and I had not created backup despite having wisely and loudly recommended it to everybody around! Talk about practising what you preach!
Today, with the enormous amount of data that goes to and fro between our workspaces, all connected devices and servers, cloud accounts, online back ups, the ease of capturing images, audios and videos, all kinds of transactions taking place digitally and an equally enormous quantity of complicated passwords required to protect it all, keeping track can be a nightmare. Everything is connected and yet the loss of one key password or one device can create havoc in our lives.
I have learned to keep a semblance of control by minimising my digital clutter. This came about from treating my Digital office somewhat like a physical office and serves two main purposes:
- I have less stuff to keep track off which provides me with more mental space to work on what is important. My office remains cleaner with plenty of breathing space. I have a general awareness of what is approximately stored and where, which again helps me find what I need when I need it, again freeing my mind space.
- Things function faster, efficiency is optimised.
Other than this, I also do not require unlimited terabytes of spaces to store the unnecessary. This is a reflection of my vital physical Spaces, in part, when I learned that, the stuff I acquired expanded to fill the spaces I had, practically pushing me out, until I decided to reorganise those spaces and ask for more free vital living space for myself rather than for storing stuff there which eventually, I realised I did not really need.
It was an inversion of direction in a way. The aim is to maintain x amount of free space and fill up the rest with only the truly useful rather than prioritise the filling up and then seek more space to keep on filling up and so on and so forth!
It is by no means a completed process yet, I find myself still resisting the purge in many cases, both physically and digitally, but I also know that is the question of time, before a lot of the remaining stuff gets chucked out, freeing yet more space!
Digitally, I have created a daily and weekly routine to clear out space, files, data, images, messages, browsing cache, history etc. I do a further, deeper clearing out once every few months, to remove old files that I’m sure I will not be utilising again.
“And what if you do, by chance, require something that you may have deleted further on?” you may ask. This is exactly the kind of thinking that created the clutter for me in the first place. So far, so good, I haven’t and if it does happen, why, I’ll simply pretend that my disk crashed.
I have had that experience twice although the second time round, all the “important” stuff had been backed up!
As a mindfulness practitioner and life-design coach, I help clients focus on well-being and personal growth and make life choices that prioritize their mental and emotional health. This leads to personal freedom and independence allowing the person to blossom and manifest the life they deserve. Connect with me if you are seeking to go forward on your journey.