When was the last time you decluttered your phone or laptop? Old pictures, emails, apps and more can take up so much space on these devices and can cause your device to run significantly slower. It’s time to declutter your digital space!
This post will show the different ways you can declutter and organize your phone and laptop without feeling too overwhelmed.
Decluttering Your Phone
Apps
When organizing your phone, the first thing I recommend doing is deleting unnecessary apps.
Start by swiping to the very last page on your phone (this is where a lot of the apps you don’t use/forgot about will be) and begin deleting apps. Go through every app you have and ask yourself, “Do I really need or use this?”
Be thorough; If you haven’t used an app in over two months, I think it’s safe to delete it.
Here are some examples of apps you probably don’t need:
- games
- photo/video editing apps
- investment apps that you don’t use
- horoscope apps
Deleting apps is the easiest and fastest way to begin decluttering your phone, but you can go even deeper than this.
Once you have gotten rid of any apps you don’t need, I recommend moving onto your photos and going through those. This is the step that can take forever to do, especially if you have thousands of pictures from years ago.
Deleting Pictures
Deleting pictures can be a very scary thing, especially if you’re doing it wrong. This is the order I would begin decluttering my photos:
- Screenshots Album
- Assuming you have an iPhone, I would start by going through your ‘Screenshots‘ album first. This is because you most likely have several screenshots that you accidentally took and forgot to delete. Just go through each photo and delete any accidental screenshots or screenshots that you meant to take, but no longer need.
- Recents Album
- After going through your screenshots album, you can move on to your ‘Recents‘ album. This is where all of your pictures are.
- Scroll to the very top of the camera roll and just start going through each photo one by one. Delete any pictures that you no longer need.
- For example:
- lecture notes
- pictures of food
- accidental pictures
- pictures that you sent someone and don’t need anymore
- For example:
- For anyone who takes Instagram pictures on their phone, delete all the pictures that were not part of favorites list (the ones of you blinking, making a weird face, etc.) – you don’t need 50+ photos of the same exact thing!
- I (personally) wouldn’t delete any pictures of yourself (besides the photos mentioned above) or of family/friends. It’s up to you to decide whether the picture is worth keeping.
This step can take forever, so take your time and don’t feel like you have to do it all in one day. You can spread it out throughout the week.
Then, once you clean out your pictures, you can just maintain them by going through them weekly/monthly – depending on how many pictures you take. It’s so much easier to keep your pictures decluttered by routinely going through them, rather than waiting several months and then deleting them; the same thing applies when you’re cleaning out your laptop.
Google Photos
Google Photos is an amazing way to back up all of your pictures. Once you go through your pictures, I would take the time to download them onto Google Photos so that you always have a backup of them.
Then, once they are downloaded onto Google Photos, you can delete all of your pictures off of your phone; this will allow you to have more storage.
*You can still have all of your photos on your phone in the Google Photos App, but not on your ‘Photos’ app itself.*
I moved all of my pictures onto Google Photos in the beginning of the year so that I only have pictures of this year in my ‘Photos’. If I need to find a picture from a few years ago, it’s very easy to find it on Google Photos!
Emails
It’s time to stop hoarding your emails and creating unnecessary waste in the environment! There is no reason you should have over 1,000 emails on your phone. Just delete them. The easiest way to do this would be to click “Edit” and then “Select All” and delete them. However, you probably don’t want to do this for fear of deleting something important.
Instead, you can click “Edit” and individually select the emails you want to delete. This will take more time, but you should be able to finish within an hour.
Deleting emails should take considerably less time than deleting your photos. This is because any email over 1 year old is probably safe to delete (and if you have hundreds of emails, there’s a good chance most of them are over a year old).
I would scroll to the very bottom of my email and just select a ton of them and delete.
This would also be a good time to unsubscribe from any email lists so that you’ll stop receiving emails for things you have no interest in.
Other Ways to Declutter/Organize Phone
- Organize your apps into specific categories: Editing, Finance, Social Media, Music, Work, School, etc.
- Put these apps into folders
- Go through your missed calls and voicemails
- Anything with notifications – go through them (or turn off the notification)
- Organize your email inboxes – create inboxes for: Work, School, Bank, Subscriptions, etc.
There are plenty of different ways to organize your phone and make it look cleaner or more ‘aesthetic’, but decluttering is the perfect way to start!
Decluttering Your Laptop
For me, decluttering my laptop took a very long time, because I had thousands of untitled documents and downloads. When I began cleaning out my laptop, this was the order I started in:
- Google Drive
- I had so many college papers/slides/notes, etc. in my google documents and I decided to keep them.
- I moved them into folders within Google Docs.
- Depending on the types of documents you have, you can create any kind of folder.
- Moving your documents into folders will make your Google Drive significantly more organized and it will also be easier to locate items in the future.
- Downloads
- The next thing I did was go through all of my downloads. This took me several days. As I said before, none of my downloads were titled, so I had to click every single one to see if I needed to delete it.
- As you’re going through these downloads, it would be smart to rename all of the ones you decide to keep so that you won’t have to do it later.
- Titling documents will save you so much time in the future and will allow you to organize your laptop even further
Tips to Decluttering
- Routinely clean out your devices
- This will make your life so much easier in the future. Once you finish decluttering the first time, clean them out weekly, monthly or however often is necessary for you.
- Create folders
- This is one of the easiest ways to keep things organized. Whether it’s folders on your phone or on your laptop, this is a great way to easily access what you’re looking for.
- Title everything
- This will save you time in the future because you won’t have to click on downloads to see what the document/picture/video is. This also goes hand-in-hand with creating files; it’s much easier to create a file when your documents are titled!
Take Your Time
Decluttering your laptop/phone is no small task, especially when you’re trying to be thorough. Don’t feel like you have to do this all in one day; it can be very draining. If you have an open schedule, start by cleaning out your phone and then moving onto your laptop. Give yourself a few days to do this – maybe even a week. If you try to do this in one day, you are likely to 1. you are likely to burn out and give up and 2. get lazy halfway through and not do a good job.
Despite decluttering being a lot of work, it’s worth it! You probably have so many different things taking up space and you don’t even realize. Also, once you take the time to do a deep clean, it will be easier to maintain in the future.
Organizing your digital space is also a form of self-care. A lot of people feel overwhelmed when their physical space is unorganized and this can cause anxiety. The same effect can happen when you feel unorganized with your digital devices.
Keeping this area of your life organized is just as important as keeping the space around you organized.
Related Articles
For a more in-depth tutorial for how you can declutter your laptop, read this article! It tells you why you should clean out your laptop as well as the different ways you can do so.
I hope this post inspired you to declutter your phone, laptop or other devices!
Leave a comment if you have any questions