Digital Spring Cleaning Part 2

In our last post, Digital Spring Cleaning Part 1, we started talking about how you can spread your spring cleaning to your digital world.

What better way to go bid farewell to the spring season than one more round of spring cleaning, digital style!

(Also, keep in mind that "spring cleaning" doesn't need to happen in the spring. It's a state of mind.)

Below we'll continue to dive deep into getting your digital world dialed in. So let's spring into summer and get into it!

Clean up your contacts

It's not just our own files, emails, and data that contribute to digital clutter. Sometimes that can come from other people we interact with digitally.

Take a look at who you're following on social media. Americans spend an average of 12 hours per day on social media, that's way too much time to give people whose content doesn't contribute positively to your life an open invitation to your brain.

Don't be afraid to remove someone from your digital life if their content doesn't make you feel good.

If you are really feeling guilty about this, hide their posts instead of deleting them completely.

The same goes for the contacts on your phone. Go through each contact and ask yourself when the last time you connected with that person or business was. Was it a week ago? A month? Longer? Dig a little deeper. Was it a positive interaction? Do they help you or make you feel good? If you answer these questions honestly you'll know if the contact can be deleted

Review recurring payments and apple subscriptions

It's so easy to forget about recurring payments or subscriptions and they can add up quickly without you noticing it's happening.

$11.99 for Hulu isn't too bad but when you add to that $12.99 for Netflix, $12.99 for Amazon, and $12.99 for Disney+ that's already over $600 a year. And that's only streaming services. There are also subscriptions to non-streaming apps, monthly subscription boxes, memberships, services, and the list goes on.

U.S. Household Bill Pay Market Size: $2.75 Trillion Spent by American Consumers Each Year on Recurring Bills (Source: Buisness Wire)

You can always do the leg work and find these recurring payments on your own, some banks even offer the ability to view recurring payments but if you're looking to make this process a bit easier we recommend the following services that will show you what your recurring subscriptions are we recommended:

• TrueBill

• TrackMySubs

• Subscro

Delete Unused Apps

Studies show that the average phone user has more than 80 apps on their phone. However, most people only use around 30 of those apps at all and less than 10 on a daily basis. That's basically turning your phone into a storage unit for apps.

Quick! Without looking, how many apps do you think you have on your phone? The answer may surprise you.

Now let's fact-check your app usage and more importantly your app storage.

In your phone's settings menu, go to the section on storage. There you will find the apps that are taking up the most space and the ones you haven't used in a while.

Go through your apps one by one and free yourself up some valuable storage space on your phone.

If you need help organizing your digital world, we're here for you!

Click HERE to get started

Digital Spring Cleaning Part 1

Ahh, springtime! The air is fresh and crisp. The world feels new and full of possibilities. What better time to make your home feel the same way?

Spring cleaning is one of our favorite unofficial holidays but we only recently learned its origins. In the early 1800s, cold weather forced people into the warm embrace of soot-producing heating methods like fire, coal, and oil. Once the warmer weather started rolling in, it was a necessity to clean all of the soot that settled in people's homes.

Obviously, we've come a long way since then. Now we get alerts when our air purifier filter needs to be changed. It's still good to air your place out after a stuffy winter but now spring cleaning is more of an act of rebirth for you and your space.

These days there's more to spring cleaning than dust-busting and closet cleanouts. There's never a bad time to do spring cleaning, even if it's almost summer. This is why we're going to take you through a few digital spring cleaning tips to help you declutter and take control of your digital life as well.

Picture this!

Not having enough storage on your phone or cloud backup can be frustrating. Especially when you get the notification when you're trying to take a picture or video. If this has happened to you here's what you can do.

Open your photos and go to Media Types.

Instead of trying to review all the photos on your phone all at once on an infinite scroll, break up the task into bite-sized portions. Going down the list one by one, review the different types of pictures and videos makes it much more manageable to narrow down what is being stored.

Different media types also take up different amounts of storage per file. Keep this in mind if you're trying to create space. Slo-mo videos take up more space than regular videos, portraits take up more space than regular pictures, and long videos will take up more space than short ones.

Another tip, when reviewing photos and videos for deletion is the Select tool. Instead of deleting everything one-by-one until your brain melts, press the Select button and choose multiple photos at a time. Then delete them in bulk.

Choose what you're deleting

Delete!

Select button in the top right

Make sure after you've completed these steps you go into your Recently Deleted album. Iphones hold on to what you delete for 30 days before automatically deleting them permanently. This is great if you accidentally deleted something but if you're trying to free up space on your phone and you know you want to delete everything in the Recently Deleted album you have to go in and delete them permanently right away.

Email Overload

Last year 300.4 billion emails were sent and received so it's completely understandable that without a good set of labels and the discipline to keep up with them, it's all too easy for your inbox to become overstuffed.

As the famous Chinese proverb says,

"A journey of 1000 unread emails starts with one newsletter"

Or something like that...

Find one recurring email sender you want to reduce, let's say JunkMail@OverstuffedInbox.com, search the email address in your inbox search bar.

Once you've got the results from your search, use the select all function and delete those unneeded emails away in bulk.

If you want to search for something specific besides just a sender's email try advanced search. Using an advanced search you can find:

• Emails that contain specific words or phrases (like unsubscribe or newsletter)

• Emails with large attachments taking up storage space

• Emails sent on specific dates

• Much more

The end goal is to get your inbox to zero, and here's why.

Imagine if every piece of mail you ever received was in your mailbox.

Letters, bills, magazines. Some opened, some unopened. All just left in your mailbox in a giant, unsorted heap. How would you find something from the heap if you needed it? How would that make you feel? How would your neighbor feel?

Whether you're clearing your inbox through deleting correspondence you don't need or labeling every email you receive and archiving it out of your inbox. The inbox is for emails you actively need or are working on. Everything else should be labeled and archived.

If you want to dive deeper than bulk deleting recurring emails, take a look at your emails that are over 5 years old. Do you need them all? Review, purge and repeat going back through time.

Password Protection

We've noticed a lot of people lately keeping notebooks with their passwords handwritten in them for safekeeping. Yes, we're talking to you dad.

With this method, the negatives really outweigh the positives.

On the plus side, you have all your accounts and passwords at your fingertips, but what happens if you lose it? Or if it gets ruined and isn't legible anymore? You could be locked out of your accounts, or worse be handing over the keys to the kingdom to whoever finds your notebook.

Instead of this, we recommend using LastPass to store and protect your usernames and passwords.

We also recommend regularly changing your passwords. As much as you love the password you used for your AOL Instant Messenger log-in, changing it up is good practice.

Spring is the perfect time to update your passwords and the method you use to keep yourself and your digital world safe. Changing your password minimizes your risk of breaches and helps keep your digital assets safe.

If you need help organizing your digital world, we're here for you!

Click HERE to get started

Stay tuned for part 2 coming soon!

Debunking that Getting Organized is Difficult

By now you have seen every video of "How to Fold a Fitted Sheet", How to Organize Your Pantry, How to Organize Your Closet, How to, How to, How to....

From Marie Kondo's, KonMarie Method, to the color flaring ladies at the Home Edit, we have just about seen every tip, trick, method and way about it all. So why is it still difficult for people to wrap their heads around how to tackle this simple task of organizing? Time, confidence, and patience.

The COVID pandemic has brought to light that we all have way too much time on our hands, but most people use their time unwisely because they haven't been taught how to manage their time. Before COVID think about what you would do with your spare time, IF you even had much of it? Now you can't cross off things from your lists faster. as we all have a lot of "spare" time.

Could you be doing more to create organizational discipline and systems in your life without feeling overwhelmed?

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ONE: just start with something you enjoy in your life that you would want more organized. This doesn't say, start with something that would benefit you if you were more organized, it clearly says, start with something you enjoy in your life that you would want more organized. Figure out for yourself what that would be. Could be your cookbooks, could be your linens, could be your office supplies now that you're working from home and it even could be your vitamins. Whatever it is it is most likely covered in Organize & Create Discipline: An A-to-Z Guide to an Organized Existence so know whatever you try and tackle, we have your back.

TWO: purge! Yep... you've heard it again and again, the best way to start organizing is by knowing what you have and what a better way to do this, than going through your stuff. This doesn't mean you HAVE TO purge anything and get rid of anything, it just means it would be wise to sort through everything you're working on and decide if it's necessary to have. Once this is done, you can move to step three.

THREE: once you are familiar with your stuff and know what you're working with now it's time to decide where things should live and what kind of organizational devices you might need to contain and keep order down the line. A measuring tape can be your best friend if the space is going to need bins, storage, dividers, canisters, plastic drawers, totes, drawer organizers....you get the idea. Know what you are buying and size it up prior to organizing.

FOUR: now that you have your supplies and your personal items you want to organize it's as easy as clean up, 1, 2, 3, BUT the real trick, and why people like Kondo, Home Edit, and us at the O.C.D. Experience get to work constantly with new clients is because we see space differently. We envision what the space should look like, should function as, and most importantly how simple it should be to keep up the work you put into organizing it. We say clean up 1, 2, 3 because think about how easy it should be for a child to put things back where they go. Make organizing your stuff easy enough for a child to keep up. If you need to label things, label them. If you need to pull things out and put them back a couple of times to see if it works, do it. No one is judging you but yourself. As Tony Robbins says, it is the invisible forces that are influencing you and affecting the results you get. Don't let anyone, let alone the invisible forces keep you from finding organizational bliss.

So what is stopping you?! Pick something right now that has been bothering you to "tidy up" or needs a little cleaning out. It will be worth your time just to know what you have let alone know how to keep it organized after you leave it.