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Clutter makes me crazy. Even though I’m the one who generates most of it in my own house, there’s nothing that pushes me over the edge faster than tripping over shoes in the entryway, sifting through piles of paperwork, or moving a clean-laundry mountain just to get into bed at night.
Just like a messy house can cause many a meltdown, research shows digital clutter is a source of major anxiety, too.
A recent survey by global services company Adaptivist showed most people spend about 45 minutes a day searching through digital info to find a report, email, or some other super important tidbit they need for work or family. That’s a whopping 22+ hours a month and nearly 11 days (270 hours) a year!
Let’s not go into another year hoarding photos and ignoring emails. Here are five fast fixes to “clean sweep” digital clutter, get back time – and sanity – in your life.
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Find out what’s taking up space
Running out of space on your smartphone is one of the most common signs of cyber-clutter these days – and it’s usually an easy problem to solve – starting with clearing out apps. The average person has about 80 apps on their smartphone but uses less than 10 of them regularly.
If you have an iPhone, go to Storage through your general settings to identify the biggest space hogs. You might see a list of recommendations, like I did with the message below about videos – that I didn’t even know downloaded onto my device from Podcasts and the Wakeout app.
Getting rid of those took a few minutes and I checked my settings to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. You can also tap an app’s name for more information about its storage and:
- Offload it, which frees up storage, but keeps its documents and data,
- Delete it, which wipes out the app and any related data,
- Or, depending on the app, choose to delete some of the documents and data attached to it.
How to do do this on iPhones:
To automatically offload apps, go to Settings > App Store > Offload Unused Apps.
To manually offload apps, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Offload Unused Apps.
To reinstall an offloaded app, tap on the app icon to download it again.
You can also long-press an app and choose Delete App (the little garbage can icon).
How to do this on Android phones:
You can basically do the same thing through general settings and Storage here too. Sometimes it’s called Apps & Notifications and sometimes it’s just called Apps – but it’s the same idea. Tap on an app to clear its cache or the storage it uses. If you have some giant files in there, you might also see a “Free up space,” option, which lets you clear out even more clutter with a simple tap or two.
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Delete duplicate photos
Next, onto all those photos you shot … and then forgot. Clear out duplicates, blurry images and screenshots. If you didn’t tap that little heart on the image originally, ask yourself why you’re keeping it around. Does it capture your attention or epitomize a moment? If the answer is a clear, “nope,” then ditch it already!
You can press the “select button” in the upper right corner to drag over multiple images to delete at once. But even better? There are a whole slew of apps to do the dirty work for you.
I use Remo Duplicate Photos Remover (free for iOS and Android). Download the app, click “yes” when it asks your permission to access your photo/video library and click “scan.”
My scan took about three minutes, because I have almost 53,000 photos/screengrabs on my phone. Then you have the option of deleting all the duplicates in one tap or going through individual sets. There are several safeguards built-in so that you don’t accidentally get rid of sets you want to keep. Be sure to get rid of Screenshots here too!
Remo’s free, but there are others that are really great too, like Gemini Photos, Cleanup and Smart Cleaner. They all let you try them for free, but as much as $35 a year, depending on what futures you choose. (Many of these latter apps also let you use them to delete duplicate contacts too.)
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Organize like a pro
Once you’ve purged, it’s time to organize like a pro. Both iPhones and Androids have great built-in photo and video management tools, if you know where to look and take a few minutes a month to purge and sort.
For iPhones: Use the My Albums section to create handy little folders for what you love the most. Some people do it by months, people, or events. I get a little more personalized and do it by categories like Funny, Epic Trips, Grandma, Juni (my dog’s name) and important events I want to revisit with a quick tap.
You can also search for really specific things in your photos such as “dogs,” “trees,” “art,” places, or specific people. It’s great to do this and then create albums that make the most sense to you.
For Android: You can also use Google Photos, which is the stock Android photo manager but it works for iOS devices too. It has the Smart Assistant feature that helps you sift, group and set up albums. It also recognizes people and groups them together, making it easy to find photos of a particular family member or friend.
There are other more specific photo editing and organizing apps, but these two are great places to start and they’re both free – with limits. For Google Photos, you get charged if y
ou exceed 15GB and for iCloud you pay when you hit 5GB.
Unsubscribe from everything!
There were a few days over this past holiday season that I felt like all I did was click “Unsubscribe” on emails for hours at a time. Seriously. From promotional junk to newsletters and just plain Spam, I feel like it’s time to unsubscribe from everything!
Most email providers have a folder titled “Subscriptions” that bunch them all into one place and let you go through and request to Unsubscribe one-by-one. Sometimes this works, but often it does not, especially if you have several email addresses forwarded to one account. Luckily, there are apps for this too.
I use Unroll.me, even though it was in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just a few years ago for misleading people over sharing information with other companies. It’s since cleaned up its act, but it’s a good reminder to “think before you download,” especially on a service that’s “free.” There are also several other others like Clean Email, Leave Me Alone and Unsubscriber by Polymail which does a similar service – free to try – then charges a fee of around $20-$30 a year.
It takes a few minutes to set them up, but basically you just download the app, connect your email addresses, give them a minute to scan and then it shows all the email subscriptions that are in your inbox and the option to ditch them once and for all. Unroll.me gives you the choice to unsubscribe and delete, or tap the Rollup feature to group any newsletters you actually want to keep, into a once a day digest that arrives in your inbox when you want it to.
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Protect your passwords
There’s no way to do a “clean sweep,” of your digital world without polishing your passwords. If you still think using your name, birthday, address, pet’s name, or 123456 is good-enough password, try this little trick: Plug your email address into haveibeenpwned.com to see how many times your passwords show up in breaches. Then get a password manager.
A good password manager is worth the anywhere from $5 to $30 a year you pay for it for several reasons:
- You only need to to remember one password: the one you use to login to your password manager app.
- It auto-generates different passwords for every single login.
- It protects your passwords in a super-encrypted cloud vault.
- It syncs across your devices – desktop, iOS android, smart watch, even borrowed computers.
I use 1Password, but also really like LastPass, BitWarden and DashLane. You can try most of these free for one or two weeks, then they cost around $30 a year depending on the features.
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