Digital Declutter: The BIG Checklist To Obtain Digital Minimalism

Introduction

Digital Decluttering: The BIG Checklist is a big list of prompts to help you sweep out electronic cobwebs and slay those thundering herds of digital dust bunnies. It provides a systematic approach to ensure you find all the flotsam and jetsam of your digital clutter. The BIG Checklist is a guide with systems for you to achieve digital minimalism.

Prior to decluttering my digital life, my home was neat and organized, as was my studio space. But inside my laptop, my smartphone, and my cloud spaces, my digital life was a huge mess! It shouldn’t be too complicated to organize a few files, a bunch of emails, and some photos, I thought, but I soon discovered my digital life was so much more than that.

I worked through the KonMari Method™ of tidying up and decluttering my home. I then followed that up with a day-to-day maintenance program to keep my home organized. After much searching, I was unable to find a similarly simple yet comprehensive digital declutter checklist.

The checklists and articles I found fell short in different ways. Many of the lists only helped in a few areas, and with others, the time span recommended for all of them was literally impossible to complete considering the extent of my mess. I needed a solution beyond the two-week or thirty-day lists I was finding—unless I planned on painfully tackling my clutter like an over-caffeinated university student cramming for finals.

I created The BIG Checklist for myself and have expanded it for your use along with tips and good habits to maintain your digital organization for the long term. The BIG Checklist provides clear steps that have worked for me through mapping my digital life, creating better habits, consistently completing each task, and cleaning out each digital storage space.

I feel much more relaxed when I open my devices after having decluttered my digital life.

Digital decluttering isn’t about deleting everything. It’s about right-sizing your digital life. If you have empty space in one room of your house, yet another area is horribly crowded, you will rearrange your home for the best flow possible. Time to do the same for your digital life.

Upon completing The BIG Checklist, your computer will become noticeably faster, your workflow will be noticeably smoother, and your new familiarity with your devices will make it easier to resolve problems when they arise.

Even the biggest of big checklists have limitations, and The BIG Checklist is no exception. The BIG Checklist is a big list of organized tasks and prompts. The questions are there to help you dig yourself out from under your gigantic pile of digital clutter. We each have different work, family, and lifestyle needs and wants, creating impressively different digital lives. New technologies are being created every day, so it is impossible to give specific steps for each task in every computer operating system within a single book. I have included a section of options for you to choose from when you need more information for your specific device. In addition, there is an abundance of information online that can be found through a few simple internet searches.

I’ve arranged the chapters of this book to systematically deal with the various areas of your lives that are encroached upon or dominated by the digital world. I have also provided you with monthly, weekly, and daily habits in which to maintain your decluttering progress for the long term. It’s okay to skip around between Chapters 6 - 33 as you need to. Those without a vehicle or pets can skip whole sections of The BIG Checklist. However, skipping due to procrastination is only cheating yourself. You may need to persistently and repeatedly spend time in a single chapter, such as decluttering photographs from a massive backlog of vacations and birthday parties.

Organizing your digital clutter is a long-term project. I’ve included methods to help you track your progress, thus providing insights into improving your decluttering habits as you learn what works. Depending on the volume of your digital clutter and how much additional computer knowledge you may need to learn, it will take several months to complete.

This is a long-term decluttering adventure, a triathlon with maintenance tips to help it stick. Make the commitment to create a digitally decluttered life. Your resolution will make a huge difference towards achieving digital minimalism. By making this resolution, you promise yourself a reasonable, healthy, extended period of time in which to complete all of the tasks required to produce an uncluttered life.

So grab a friend or two and take up the challenge. A quest to sweep away digital dust bunnies is best completed with great partners at your side!

1

Your Current Digital Mess

Frustration. Anger. Stress. Overwhelming mess. Searching for a file is like looking for that shirt you know you washed. Is it still in the dryer? Did you leave it in the pile on the sofa to be folded? Is it on the ironing board to be ironed? Wait! Did you even move that load into the dryer? Or was it simply lost between your washer and your closet?

While you are not actually tripping over your digital life like you do with laundry, it is often the same feeling. It’s like a huge pile that sucks your brainpower, your time, and your money. When you do attempt to deal with it, you end up frantically searching for everything you have hiding in your computers, the cloud, SD cards, USBs, and external hard drives. In last-minute efforts, you start madly deleting photos, videos, and documents, hoping you are not deleting anything important, all so you can find space to take a few more photos or shoot just one more minute of video. Your mad decluttering under duress doesn’t really help you manage your big, messy piles of digital clutter.

You are losing time to poor workflows and searching for files. You ask yourself which account you saved that project in. How much time have you lost in your life searching for lost files? You know they are in there, somewhere, hanging out in cyberspace. You know you saved it somewhere. If only you could remember where it was or if you tagged it properly. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a system in place to put your files away and easily find them the next time you searched?

You receive incessant reminders from companies that your storage is running low, increasing your distractions throughout the day. Do your books send you messages that they are cluttering the living room? Of course not. Do the scattered Legos in the dining room tell you they are out of place? Not exactly, but we do know when we step on them, tripping over the various bits and stubbing our toes. Does anyone send you daily messages reminding you that your laundry needs to be folded and put away? Oh, wait, your new dryer does that!

The data storage companies know you can’t see your clutter, so they need to repeatedly send you messages to clean up your data mess! Just think about those piles of photographs that are filling their storage units, along with the old tax forms you’ve scanned and that huge presentation you gave at work last fall. There is likely an old, abandoned blog, too. You’re probably not ready for emergencies, either. In the event of a fire, hurricane, or flood, you will need your digital assets to be kept safe. On that note, you really should take photos of your possessions for the insurance company and store them in the cloud.

In addition to issues with your data, there are likely extra devices and cords scattered around your house, the car, and your work locations. You probably have piles of devices—old and new—along with all the cords, chargers, and other accessories that go with them. Plus, there are the extra cords you bought because you lost one of them, the other extra cords you bought because it was left behind when you went away on holiday, and the extra charging cords you’ve forgotten at home that you needed for business trips. Decluttering your hardware will help you see what you have for external storage options, with extra cords, chargers, and accessories going towards your emergency preparedness.

It can become an overwhelming headache of migraine levels to even think about tackling the mess of your digital life. Chances are that you are overwhelmingly lost on how to deal with it all. Options elude you and decision fatigue has set up house and is choosing paint colors. You need to take command of this mess systematically. A results-oriented house-cleaning system helps you take command of your physical realm. Similarly, it is time to take command of your digital realm!

Digital decluttering is more than removing excess and consolidating digital assets. It’s also about right-sizing your apps, your assets, your storage, and your devices. You want to utilize all of the software's features to derive the most benefits for your time and your money.

When you are stressed out by your digital clutter, the recommendation of a digital detox is often given, meaning a full break away from your digital life with complete rest. The only problem with the usual detox methods is that when you turn the power back on again to your digital life, all the clutter is still there, most of which caused the stress in the first place. You may have tried several digital detox sessions thinking it would help, but it doesn’t because you are returning to the exact same situation you left: a big black hole of data, filled with files and photos of your digital life from the past five, ten, or even twenty years! It’s so much easier to be passive-aggressive about the mess and just shut your device down.

It is overwhelming to think about the amount of digital stuff that has permeated our lives. I feel that if we had control over all this stuff, a digital detox wouldn’t be necessary! Therefore, it is very important for your files and accounts to be maintained. The status quo is untenable. According to a paper in Media Psychology, a digital detox from social media may not work. As reported on by The British Psychological Society website, In one of the few experimental studies in the field, researchers have found that quitting social media for up to four weeks does nothing to improve our well-being or quality of life.

By not decluttering first, a digital detox is just an ostrich-style escape that solves nothing. When you have completed your digital decluttering prior to stepping away for a much-deserved break, you will return to an organized system instead of an entire mountain of demanding data. Using The BIG Checklist, a good system of habits following your big declutter, will leave you feeling as relaxed in your decluttered digital life as you do in your decluttered home, and your next digital detox will have a high chance of being successful.

On your path to minimalism, you likely took action regarding the clutter in your house. The piles of books in the corner were culled and properly shelved. Your clothes are beautifully hung, and you have space to breathe. Your kitchen is now arranged for a workflow to get everyone smoothly out the door each morning.

If you have ever read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and applied its principles to your clutter, your eyes have likely been opened to an amazing lightness that is relaxing and stress-free.

Keeping with these minimalist principles, you say, No, to so many things you see in the stores. Having just spent loads of time and energy removing clutter, you don’t want it building up again. You’ve had the elation of finding bits and pieces here and there that you really don't need and can move on to the next owner.

There has finally been enough room in your home to fully implement a house-cleaning system. What a change! Instead of taking a whole day in exasperation to finally get the house cleaning done, you can calmly take a few minutes each day, and the house actually keeps its shine, ready to have guests over within minutes.

In the same way, digital minimalism and decluttering can make your digital life much more relaxing. Being able to find those important digital assets almost immediately will greatly increase your productivity and reduce your stress.

Use The BIG Checklist as your guide on this journey as you mark each step and take control of your digital life.

2

Oh, No! What Happened?

You are stressed out. The boss is demanding the project update, your youngest child is too ill to go to school today, and you’ve just spilled coffee onto your laptop! By the time you clean up the coffee spill, your laptop is dead. What about the data that was on it? Your mind races to remember the last time you backed up the files. You wrack your brain, hoping the project updates that your boss demands are safe. Sure, nowadays many of the programs back up automatically to the cloud, but some days there are glitches, and today is that day.

There are always stray documents or photographs that arrive on our computer and just sit. You think you’ll get to them tomorrow or when things let up at work, but that day never comes. Those files, especially the ones that do automatic backups, keep piling up, and the decluttering never happens.

Any number of scenarios can happen to your devices. It could be lost in a train station. It could be stolen at the coffee shop you sometimes work from. It could get corrupted by some virus or malware. Are you prepared to deal with these scenarios?

Have you missed important deadlines due to your disorganization? Are there times when you can’t find the photographs you need to complete the