BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

You know that thing where you sit down to find one photo from last summer, and somehow it’s thirty minutes later, and you’re in 2019? Digital clutter does that. A chaotic phone or a laptop full of half-forgotten downloads creates the same low-level stress as a messy room: you can’t always put your finger on why it’s bothering you, but it is, and it shows up every time you open a new tab or scroll past another folder you’ve been meaning to deal with. Most of us spend more than half our waking hours on screens. What’s on those screens is worth paying attention to.

Professional organizers are pretty consistent on this: you don’t need a whole free afternoon. Small habits do more than any single big purge.

You don’t have to do it all at once

Digital decluttering stays on the to-do list because it feels like an all-or-nothing project. A camera roll of 20,000 photos is a lot to face. But the goal isn’t to do it all at once.

“There are often small pockets of time during the day that you can take advantage of,” says Michelle Rosen, a certified professional organizer. “When you’re waiting in line at the store or at a doctor’s office, you’re probably going to pull out your phone, so take a brief moment to quickly delete emails, text messages, and unused apps.”

A few minutes, one category at a time, adds up faster than you’d think. Just screenshots. One month of photos. The top of your inbox. Keep it small, and you’ll keep doing it.

Let your phone do some of the work for you

There’s a good chance your phone has already sorted some of this for you. Most smartphones have built-in tools that group duplicates, flag blurry shots, and organize images by type: they’re usually sitting in the utilities or organization section of your photos app, waiting. A few taps and the duplicates are in the trash.

The sorting and filtering features are worth knowing about, too. Most phones let you view photos by month, file type, or category, so you can clear a whole batch of screenshots or shaky clips in one go instead of tapping through them individually.

Check the “3 Ds” regularly

If you work mainly on a computer, things pile up without you realizing. Digital organizer Isabelle Dervaux recommends a monthly check-in she calls the “3 Ds.”

“Regularly check the 3 Ds: documents, downloads, and your desktop,” she says. “Keep your downloads clean, the same way you regularly empty your mailbox, and file in the appropriate folders.”

Sorting files by size in your device settings is a quick way to find what’s eating up space. And remember to empty the trash when you’re done: files don’t free up space until you take that last step.

Name things as you go

Give files a clear name the moment you download or create them, and put them in the right folder right away. It sounds minor, but a folder full of “download_final_v3_2” files is its own kind of mess to wade through later. Future-you will notice.

Unsubscribing is easier than it sounds

You entered your email for a discount years ago, and now here come the newsletters. Unsubscribing sounds like a chore, but usually isn’t.

“None of us enjoy when important messages fall through the cracks because our inbox is too cluttered, but unsubscribing can help that happen less frequently and keep digital clutter from coming back,” says Rosen.

Most email apps now flag senders you haven’t opened in a while and offer an unsubscribe button right in the prompt. Click it. And if a junk email reaches your main inbox, unsubscribe from it rather than just deleting: two extra seconds, and it stops the next one from coming.

Do a yearly app audit

Your home screen is a lot like a room: the more on it, the more your brain has to sort through every time you look.

“If you haven’t used an app for a year or longer, it’s time to delete it,” says Kate Roberts, owner of Bee Organized Boston. “This will free up space on your phone and, more importantly, reduce the visual clutter you are forced to see every time you open it.”

Once a year, go through your installed apps and delete what you haven’t touched. It takes about ten minutes, and what you get back is a screen that doesn’t wear on you every time you pick up your phone.

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