Digital Spring Cleaning

As we do all seem to have some spare time with the remote working, i.e no commuting (loving this, no packed hot sweaty trains), this has been a perfect time to clean up and organise. I am not talking about the wardrobe and kitchen cupboards I am talking the digital life and all the clutter that goes with this.

I am trying to tackle a small part every couple of days, I spend a Pomodoro segment once every couple of days so it doesn’t seem so daunting. It is sometimes less, it may just be one folder at a time in Dropbox.

So far the things I have been working on to help out are the following.

• Photo Album

• Dropbox

• iCloud Drive

• Local Hard Drive

• Bookmarks

• Saved Weblinks to Read Later

• Evernote

Below are a couple of lines about what I have been doing here, may give you some ideas.

Photo Album

I had a warning to say I am nearly full on my space, so again another good chance to clear this up. There are so many photos in the library that are just rubbish, out of focus, when the kids have hold of the wife’s phone and just snap rubbish, surprising how many poor photos are there and how much space these take up. Also the wife has the WhatsApp setting on so all pictures from here automatically get saved to the Camera Roll.

Dropbox

Quite surprising in here scattered around and how un-organised this had become. I decided to list each folder and tackle one every couple of days. The space is not an issue, but the amount of documents I have that have not been touch for like 3 years even more in some case, which are not any use any more. Loads of technical PDF’s that are so old they will no longer be relevant (Oracle 7 etc ). Also at the same time ensure there is a relevant folder structure so it is clear. Had a lot of duplicate files as well. I have also tried to ensure there are no loose documents, ensured everything is filed away in a folder.

iCloud Drive

Similar to the above, this was not much of a problem, as fairly newer, however still had files from 2 years ago, Again not a space issue, but just nice to keep it relevant. Had more loose files here so added them to relevant folders.

Local Hard Drive

Again this is similar to the two sections up above. I don’t really have too many documents in the Documents folder. I wrote an Automator Folder action years ago, so if I do save something locally to the documents folder then it will automatically sync over to Dropbox, this way it will be backed up.

Bookmarks

I have so many bookmarks on my Mac, these sync across all the devices and to be honest I had no clue what they all were. So I started to go through them all. There were so many where the sites and or pages don’t even exist anymore so they got cleaned up. To be honest there are not really bookmarks needed anymore, if there is something to keep it then gets downloaded and saved to Evernote. Cleaned up hundreds of them.

Saved Weblinks to Read Later.

This again is similar to above, things I meant to read in Instapaper or Read Later in Safari, but then never actually got round to reading them. Again had some in Instapaper that were around 6 years old etc. Nowadays I save them to Trello so I know I have to get round to reading them so I can close the card off.

Evernote

This is my default filing cabinet for the digital world. This gets used for everything. Every single letter or note I get gets scanned and put into here so I always have a copy of everything. Which does mean I do tend to keep a lot of rubbish. I did have a good clear out at the start of the year, and as part of a weekly review I do try to keep on top of this. This ensures that everything is out the Inbox and put away in the appropriate place, also ensure that all the documents are tagged so you can easily find them all. I still had a couple of dozen that had slipped through not having a tag. If you are a big Evernote user, it is so handy to have everything tagged, using this tip you can easily find all notes that don’t have a tag. I did go through this and clear out all the tags that had been created by error, simple typo etc when trying to find a tag.

Another place you may want to look through is your email, surprising how much old email you have, and how many places you have subscribed to when you are buying something. Perhaps you are good with your emails, or maybe you are one of those people that have hundreds or more of unread emails, lets be honest if you look through them they will be weeks/months old so probably won’t be relevant any more any way.

Be interested to hear any more thoughts and suggestions, please add a comment below or ping me an email.