The Life She Wanders

View Original

How To Detox Your Life in the New Year: Tech

There’s something special about the start of a new year. It’s a blank slate, a fresh start, and the motivation is flowing like lattes at Starbucks. If you’re like me, this sense of it being a blank slate brings about feelings of organization and de-cluttering galore.

With that said, I thought it would be fun to do a 5-post mini series on how to detox various aspects of your life at the start of the year! I’ll be covering things like tech, your home, you schedule & routine, and everything in between. I’ve been focusing a lot on removing excess clutter and unnecessary stuff, so these tips are tried and true.

The first area we’re going to dive into is detoxing all things tech in your life. From your laptop to your cell phone, photos to Word Docs, I have some great tips & tricks for helping you de-clutter and organize all things tech in your life. Keep scrolling to see my tips!

CONTACTS

When was the last time you actually went through and cleaned out the contacts on your phone? I’m assuming we’re all in the same boat here and something like never or forever ago sounds about right. It’s one of those small things that we easily forget about, being more focused on adding new contacts and mentors.

I recently went through and got rid of tons upon tons of contacts…like hundreds! People you met once at a party in college and never talked to again. 10 contacts with the same first name and no last name listed…or some weird thing like “sports bar” or “stat class” listed after their first name. Those once helpful hints now serve no meaning and you can’t remember for the life of you who they are. Delete, delete, delete, delete.

Throughout my professional career, I’ve networked with and gained so many contacts. There are a lot that I may not be in touch with frequently or at all for that matter but I still want to hold on to their info for future reference. What I’ve done with those people is add them to a Google Spreadsheet. This way I can still keep their contact info on hand, easily access it, but remove it from my phone so it’s not taking up storage space. Now I have a detailed spreadsheet filled with great professional contacts, and a dedicated home for their number, email, company and beyond.

VOICEMAIL

Along the same lines, when was the last time you cleaned out your voicemail inbox? This is another one of those things on your phone that goes unnoticed and maybe you just delete the few most recent to free up any space. Instead, let’s scroll allllll the way back [2013 in my case haha] and start to delete things you no longer need.

Now if you’re like me, some of those older voicemails are from family members that you want to keep as a memory of them and their voice. I have quite a few of those and they hold a special place in my heart. I do want to work on transferring them somehow so that I can free up storage space and space in my voicemail inbox.

APPS

How many times have you downloaded an app thinking it would be the greatest thing, use it a few times and then never open it again? Guilty as charged! Apps take up a ton of space on your tech so going through and removing those that you no longer use or haven’t opened in months and years will not only free up space, but make your screen more organized.

I also like to organize my apps into folders of similar things, like travel, photo editing, TV/streaming, social, productivity, etc. This way I don’t have 983279438 pages of apps and I can easily find the folder of the app I’m looking for without cluttering up my screen. I do keep key apps that I use every single day out of a folder because it’s one less click.

EMAIL

Whether it is your personal or work account, it’s time to clean things out and organize! One thing that easily clogs up our inbox are email subscriptions…half of which we delete immediately and never open instead of just unsubscribing. One quick and easy way to see all of your email subscriptions in one place and to unsubscribe from emails you no longer want to receive is through Unroll Me. It’s so simple and easy to use, and in just a matter of minutes you’ll be freeing up unwanted emails from your inbox!

Another simple way to detox your email is to go through and delete old emails, clear out your trash and your spam folders. Be sure to keep important emails in folders or labeled so that you can easily find them when needed. I do this for both my personal, blog and work emails. If you have old emails that you want to keep but don’t need to access frequently, archive them. Email is one of those things that clutters up easily that often gets overlooked. Being that we access our email nearly every single day, make sure it’s organized and de-cluttered!

PHOTOS

I am the queen of taking pictures and between personal ones and the blog, your girl has more photos than she knows what to do with! Once a month I typically go through and delete a few photos here and there but I recently went through and did a complete overhaul on the photos and videos on my phone and WHOA did it feel good!!

I had screenshots galore saved of books I wanted to read, podcasts to check out, articles to remember and everything in between. I went through and noted all of these books, podcasts, etc into a Google Spreadsheet so that I still had the info but I could delete each individual photo off of my phone.

I’ve also gone through every single photo and video, deleting anything that was a duplicate for some reason, or something I had saved already to my laptop, or old work event photos that were just cluttering things up. All of my blog/IG photos were on my laptop so instead of having them in 2 places, I deleted them off my phone. It was kind of liberating to do this! I’m now going to work on saving things to my Google Drive, again, to free up space on my phone and in iCloud [forever hating the cloud]. You could even save things to an external hard drive.

I’ve also been going through the photos saved on my laptop…that date back to my high school competition dance days…so it’s been A LOT to say the least! Also nostalgic going through everything; always fun to relive the glory days and fun moments.

So I’m going through and deleting photos that are of the most random things, that are blurry, etc. etc. I’m making sure they are organized in their own respective folders and then filed in a folder for that year time frame. That makes it easy to access them in case I’m ever looking for anything in particular. With all of my laptop issues lately, I’m going to be working on uploading some key ones to Google Drive and also on the hunt for a reliable external hard drive to store them all on.

FILES

Just like with photos, I’m going through all of my files and removing old ones that no longer serve a purpose [looking at your college papers] and organizing those that are still relevant into dedicated folders for easy access. Files that are extremely important I’ve uploaded to Google Drive, again so that I can always access them and because of said laptop issues I mentioned earlier.

PASSWORDS

When was the last time you changed your passwords? Or are all of your passwords to everything and anything basically the same thing? Guilty on both accounts! One thing I’m working on right now is taking note of all accounts I have and starting the year off fresh with new passwords that aren’t basically all the same thing. There are programs out there that allow you to store your passwords and use just one master password to sign into all your accounts. I haven’t tried any yet but it’s something I’m looking into so I’ll keep you posted! Trust me, I know how annoying it is to remember every single password you have for like 928347928 different accounts and such!

BACK EVERYTHING UP

Back, back, back it up. High five if you sang read those words like I did typing them lol So you’ve deleted and removed everything unnecessary and you’ve organized everything into folders for easy access. Now it’s time to back things up, be it to iCloud, an external hard drive, Google Drive, etc. We put a lot of trust into technology and sometimes in the blink of an eye things can crash and you lose everything. With my recent laptop issues I had to completely reset everything and the fear of losing everything was like WHOA! It also reminded me how important it is to back everything up!

And there you have it, ways to detox the tech in your life in the New Year. I hope these tips and tricks that I’m using are helpful in your own life. Do you have any tips for detoxing all things tech? If so, share below in the comments!