January 3, 2017
In 2017, it’s time to organize your mail list subscriptions, receipts, files and images. Let’s set aside time to declutter and organize your digital life in cloud storage, emails, and your phone.
Organize your Dropbox / Google Drive
Stray files in the root folder needs a home too. Here are a few ways to sort them back to it’s rightful place.
- Create a folder for 2016 and subfolders for document categories. For example: Photos, Receipts, Presentations, Proposals and more.
- Create a 2017 folder and create subfolders for them.
- Move files over to your external hard drive to get more space for Dropbox.
Email Lists
We get a lot of emails from lists we’ve subscribed to. Perhaps we loved them four years ago but it’s no longer relevant for us today.
- Change your emailing preferences to less than once a week or once a month for newsletters that you’ve opened only once within the past 2 months
- Unsubscribe from email lists that you haven’t opened within the past 3 months. You can usually subscribe to them again in the future.
- Update your email address for mailing lists if you’ve migrated to a new address.
- Create filters for emails and categorize them into your own folder or label structure. I would recommend using “From” addresses as your filter rule for marketing / promotional emails.
Clean my Phone
You’re phone is your life! The last thing we want is to see “Storage is Full”.
- Move old photos to your external hard drive. If that’s too much, move it to Dropbox or Google Drive first.
- Delete apps that you haven’t opened for the past 3 months.
- Deleting Instagram and re-installing will clear the cache for Instagram and frees up room on your phone.
- Organize your apps into folders. Sample folder categories: Finance, Food, Photography, Social
- Update push notifications for all applications – what are they key essential notifications you need on your phone? Disable a few to reduce distraction and focus on what the priorities are
Let us know how your clean up went @splitmango