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Quick and Easy Tips for Digital Decluttering with Ashley Moon, Organizing Expert
Decluttering your space in general helps you feel more relaxed, happy, and in control. Digital clutter isn’t as in-your-face as the 67 things on your counter, but similarly distracts from your ability to be calm and productive.
Did you know? It takes your brain around 23 minutes to refocus from a single interruption!
Ashley and I spent time discussing digital decluttering and offering some quick, easy tips for digital decluttering, to enhance your focus and energy levels, save hours and save your sanity.. Remember, Ashley points out, “You don’t need to do it all manually, and you don’t have to do it all yourself!”
Our digital lives need decluttering
The average American has over 200 usernames & passwords (yes, really) and spends 11 hours per year resetting passwords. At a 60-second annoyance of having to reset your password each time, that works out to 660 separate annoyances per year! We also tend to download and save documents and pictures much more than we would if they were paper copies of things, as we don’t see it taking up our physical space in the same way.
When most people think of digital clutter, we often think of our email box. The average office worker receives over 120 emails a day, and sends 40. In the conversation with Ashley, both of us admitted to getting email newsletters we don’t read. Photos are another source of clutter– the average iOS user takes 182 photos every month. If you did this from age 18 to age 75, that would be 124,488 photos! For those of us who have had to sort through boxes of old photos after a parent or grandparent died, over 120,000 photos sounds completely overwhelming.
Why is digital decluttering important?
Ashley and I agreed that digital clutter makes our online lives more stressful and overwhelming, and saps our energy from fulfilling our life’s purpose. We can work much more efficiently, with less stress, when we reduce the digital clutter in our lives. More things asking for our attention translates to more distractions, which makes our brains work harder to achieve the same tasks. Knowing that the clutter is there also adds to our mental load, which is one reason why a full inbox can feel so tiring.
Digital Decluttering Tips
Here are four quick and easy tips to start your digital decluttering:
- Turn off notifications
- On your phone (and computer, if applicable) go to your settings and turn off notifications for as many of the applications as you reasonably can.
- Remember, you’re saving yourself about 23 minutes of re-focusing time for every interruption you remove! “Tone down and calm down” your brain by removing notifications
- Ashley said “this has been a gamechanger for me!” She doesn’t get notifications for *anything* anymore, and keeps her ringer off– “talk about being bombarded with digital clutter– these robocalls!” (PS- T-Mobile offers ScamShield for free)
- Organize your home screen on your phone
- Delete as many apps as you can, and rearrange and organize the rest.
- Keep *only* the apps on your home screen that you use every day (and that aren’t distractions)– everything else can move to page 2 or beyond!
- Close your email
- Rather than keeping your email box open all the time, close it down and only open it at scheduled times in the day.
- Get a password manager
- Take care of yourself, take care of your brain, take care of your loved ones!
How digital clutter hurts your family
As our lives become more and more digital, it becomes increasingly important to organize both your physical and your digital world, and save your next of kin from hours of additional stress and frustration.
The reality is that your digital assets are handled differently from your physical assets, and failing to plan ahead for your digital estate can mean that your assets and treasured memories are inaccessible or invisible to your loved ones after you pass.
Did you know? The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation reported $7.4 BILLION in unclaimed life insurance benefits in 2016!
Want to learn more about Ashley’s work? Check out her 90-day Decluttering Cure!
Organizing your online life helps you and your brain today, but will pay huge dividends to your next of kin in the future. Here are 7 digital estate items to care for today.Digital decluttering doesn’t have to be hard. Easeenet makes it effortless to organize and preserve your accounts, passwords, documents, memories, and critical life details in a single, user-friendly interface. Start your free trial today!
Author
Erin McCune
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