It’s been about 9 months since we talked about digital decluttering. How are your resolutions faring? What have you accomplished? Did you slip off the wagon a time or to? Chances are, if you’re human, you haven’t done perfectly. But that’s okay – it happens to the best of us.
 
What is digital decluttering?
 
It’s when you’ve got too much stuff. When your digital environment looks like a 9-year-old’s room after a sleepover. Subscriptions you don’t remember agreeing to, your social media is a jungle, and… yeah. You get the idea. It’s time to get your digital environment looking and feeling spick-and-span.
 
Cleaning up your email
 
Email subscriptions seem to multiply like rabbits in our inboxes. You unsub from one today, and you get ten new ones tomorrow. But we have a secret weapon: Sanebox. It helps filter and organize your email inbox so you only see what’s important. What’s more, it pays attention to what you do so it LEARNS what’s important to you.
 
If you’re not ready to let a robot wrest control of your inbox, you still have options. Make it a habit to unsubscribe from any newsletters you don’t care about or read. Gmail has some pretty sweet options for manually taking control of the madness as well. For example, you can have Gmail move any email with an ‘Unsubscribe’ link into a folder called ‘Optional.’
 
Taming your social media
 
Before anything else, take a peek at your various profiles and make sure everything is up to date and your ‘pinned’ content is current. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. Oh, and that profile photo of you from 20 years ago? You might want to make that current, too.
 
Data and analytics
 
Why is this even on the ‘digital declutter’ list? Because you need to make sure all that data is something you need, rather than something you just want. When you look at your data, as yourself two things: First, is this information you can take action on? Second, is the information helping you reach your goal?
 
If the answer is no to either one of those, you’d probably benefit from paring down the amount of data you have coming in, so that you can make better decisions on what to do to reach the goals you have set.
 
Credit cards
 
Okay – this might seem like another one of those off-the-wall decluttering strategies but hear us out. Sometimes your digital clutter can hide money that’s leaking out of your hands. Take a look at your last statements from each of your cards and ensure the transactions are ones you still want. You might even find you forgot to cancel a ‘free trial’ that you’ve been paying for for months. Not cool.
 
And now it’s your turn. I want you to brag about your decluttering - find us on Facebook, or Tweet @spinsucks with how many email subscriptions you’ve canceled, how many keywords you optimized, and how much money you’re saving after your digital declutter!