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Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Cleaning Month: Digital Clean-Up

Who here has digital clutter? You know, emails, bookmarks, folders on the desktop, photos waiting to be filed...Hopefully I am not the only one.  I took a break from the physical cleaning yesterday to do a bit of digital clean-up.

First, I went through my email. I have this pretty streamlined already, so all of the extras (brand newsletters, emails from Starbucks Rewards, Amazon order receipts, etc.) automatically go into correct folders to be dealt with when I get to them.  If something ends up in my inbox, it's usually because it's important for me to deal with right away.  But I had old package tracking emails to get rid of. MyPoints emails to click through. Coupon links to print from. Surveys to delete because they expired last week (month?).  Now my inbox is empty and my folders are cleaned up.

Next, I went through all the posts I had saved in my feed reader (feedly, in case you were wondering).  Posts to pin or link up in my weekly reading posts, contests to enter (half of which had already expired...oops!), coupons to print, and a few things that I unfortunately can't remember why I saved them.  Now I'm down to a handful of bookmarks, much better than the 30 or so I started with.

I took 10 seconds to delete bookmarks that were no longer important or were for sweeps that had expired. I am a nerd and when I take the time to enter a lot of online sweeps, I bookmark them by their end date so I can easily get rid of them when they're over.

Finally, I updated our external hard drive with the last month or two of pictures and documents, so everything is up to date.  It only takes me a couple minutes to do this, but for some reason the extra step of hooking my laptop up to the hard drive across the room makes it that much harder, so I don't do it as often as I should.

Still to come? I want to go through my bazillion links on Pinterest and delete those that I no longer want or need. I'll probably end up creating some new boards (hello homeschool research!) but I know I have a bunch of links to projects I'm not going to do and food I'm not going to make. I did delete my "Books to Read" board, since I created an account on GoodReads and I like that method better for books. The rest  might not happen for a little while, but it is a part of the digital clean-up.

What's your biggest digital hang-up? Or do you have a good method for keeping everything running smoothly?

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