As I blogged about here, one of my most productive actions this year has been decluttering the digital detritus from our computer. And in the hopes of helping others of you who may need to do some minimizing of your own, I am sharing some of my methods here. The result for me was very liberating and I highly recommend you give it a try yourself.
After getting my email cache down to about 200 from more than 20,000, I have since gotten it down to less than 20 and “inbox zero” is in sight. I was very methodical in whittling down my archival emails by going through them one folder at a time over the course of several days. And I limited the arrivals long ago by unsubscribing from all but the essentials.
I posted earlier that my next moves were to pare down my documents and photos, which I since have done also. Just as I touched each of our physical possessions when downsizing, I opened every digital file to determine its fate. Many I had forgotten about and others I deemed unnecessary so I deleted hundreds of documents and photos.
Other steps I took to declutter included deactivating dormant accounts, clearing out the downloads folder of old files, cleaning up bookmarked sites on our web browser, and generally culling our accounts to a select few, including our Squarespace website hosting service, our Vimeo video hosting site, and our Apple cloud storage service.
“You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like—but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology,” Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian. “They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which relationships will you prioritize, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing?”