Is it time for a digital declutter?
The average person has more than 1,000 unread emails and seven in 10 of us have never reviewed our friends or followers on social media. If it’s time to get your digital house in order, here’s where to start.
Half of UK adults spend 11 hours or more a day in front of a screen*. If you’re among them, you’ll want to ensure your digital environment is as calm a place to be as possible and tackling the clutter is a good place to start. ‘Tidying up your devices can reduce stress by providing a calmer, more organised and reflective space,’ says Zoë Aston, mental health expert for meditation app Headspace. Here’s how to go about it.
1 Tackle your inbox
If you’ve ever signed up to a retailer’s newsletter to get a discount, your inbox may be overrun with marketing emails. Using the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each email to opt out can be laborious, but you can speed up the process with a website or app such as Unroll.me or Leave Me Alone, which let you unsubscribe from multiple emails in one go.
2 Organise files
Having tons of files and unused programmes on your desktop makes it hard to find what you really need – and it can slow your computer down significantly, too. Once you’ve sorted files into clearly labelled folders and deleted anything you no longer need, an online storage app such as Google Drive (15GB free, then £1.49 a month for 100GB) can help free up space on your hard drive.
3 Manage social media
Declutter your Facebook feed by muting posts from people whose musings you could do without or by unfollowing them (click the three dots on one of their posts and select Snooze or Unfollow). If your Insta feed is clogged with content you’re not interested in, you can unfollow or mute people or brands using the three dots again.
4 Update software
A quarter of us admit we haven’t done this in the past three months** but it’s essential for keeping your devices secure. ‘New software vulnerabilities are discovered all the time and cyber criminals are quick to exploit them to carry out cyber attacks,’ warns Jessica Barker, CO-CEO of cyber security company Cygenta. ‘Fixes to these vulnerabilities are often included in updates.’