RALEIGH, N.C. — Spring is officially here, but spring cleaning means more than clearing out your homes; it also means organizing the digital parts of your life.

That includes getting rid of those old apps and cleaning out the digital clutter. 

What You Need To Know

  • Experts say there are three steps to organizing your digital life
  • Select the items you want to keep
  • Give items and folders where you keep items descriptive names
  • Arrange your folders to establish meaningful relationships between items 

 

Melanie Feinberg, an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at UNC Chapel Hill, explained the steps to organizing your digital life.

“First, select the items that you want to keep, and if you don't want to keep it, throw it away right then, and that includes things like if you're getting emails that you don't want, unsubscribe from that list. Try and reduce the flow,” Feinberg added.

Feinberg advises creating folders for the items you want to keep.

“Descriptive names. Giving the things names not only helps you find it again, but it also sort of imprints on your brain what you actually have so that you have more of a mental map, and then arrange your items into folders and arrange your folders to establish meaningful relationships between them,” Feinberg stated.

Feinberg says be sure to get rid of the files you don’t need.

“If you saw my email app, for instance, you would see folders within folders within folders, but very little in my inbox because I keep that only for the things I'm actively working on. Once I'm done with it, I delete it or a file it,” Feinberg said.

Experts say if you have hundreds of thousands of unread messages in your inbox, you might be a digital hoarder. Feinberg says that can cause you a lot of mental stress.

“When you open up your inbox and you have 11,000 emails, then that makes you feel like, 'oh, I have so much that I need to do,' but if you open your inbox, and you only have ten emails, oh, my to-do list is much less. I do feel like my inbox functions as a kind of to do list,” Feinberg says.

Feinberg says being organized in your digital life is just as important as being organized in your personal life.

“I feel like tolerance for clutter is something that is a little bit individual. On the other hand, too much clutter and none of us is able to manage effectively, so by keeping things a little bit neater and a little bit simpler, we can all be more effective in our personal and professional lives,” Feinberg says.