How To Organize Your Digital Space

Clean up and organize your digital space with these amazing tips. Make your online life just as organized as your offline one. This is how to do it.

Sure your desk and home office need to be organized, but how organized is your phone and computer? And what about that inbox? Don’t ignore your digital space as you start to organize your life.

Wondering where to begin? Get our FREE guide, The 30-Minute Organizing Secret, and discover easy ways to overcome the chaos of clutter – even with kids at home!

Organize Your Digital Space

I’m excited to focus on another element of life that doesn’t usually get much attention – but is often in desperate need of organization. I’m talking about your digital space. After all, many of us live online as much as we exist in the physical world. We rely on our cell phones, laptops, and tablets to stay connected, get work done, and relax at the end of a long day.

Unfortunately, when it comes to tidying up, we don’t give our digital space the same attention we give our physical space. It’s easy to neglect your mess when you can ignore it by simply shutting off a screen! However, with a little effort, you’ll find there are plenty of ways you can clean, organize, and otherwise enhance your digital space:

Easy Ways to Organize Your digital Space

Let’s get down to it. Here’s how to go through and organize your digital space.

First, go through and clean up your social media accounts. If it’s been a while since you’ve audited your social media presence, take a look at your profiles. Look into your security settings and make sure onlookers only have access to as much info as you want them to. In terms of how much to share, less is definitely more.

This is also a good time to recheck who you are following and who your online friends are. Get rid of any bots, block spammy accounts, and finally unfriend any toxic people.

And don’t forget to take this time to look back at how much time you are spending on social media. Could you be spending more time off of them? Give it a shot!

2. Overhaul your email inbox

Next, it’s time to go through your inbox. This is probably one of the scariest and biggest jobs!

There are two types of people in the world – people with no unread emails, and people with more than they can manage. If you’re one of the latter, consider making a change.

What should you do to organize your inbox? Do as many of these things as possible.

Unsubscribe from Newsletters – Chances are your email is flooded with subscriptions you never read. Unsubscribe from all of them. Unroll.me is my favorite program for this. It batches all your newsletters together and you just go through and click “unsubscribe” one by one.
Add filters – Create folders and set up incoming email to go automatically into these folders. That way you can set aside time to read your work emails all at once without trying to find them among your social media notifications.
Delete – Get rid of as many old emails as you can. It’s a pain to try and search for that specific email and have to sift through worthless stuff to get to it.

Everything You Need to Know to Organize Your Digital Life

3. Update Your Passwords

Another way to organize your digital space is to update your passwords.

Leaving your passwords unchanged for too long is never a good idea. Use the new season as a good excuse to refresh your passwords on all of your devices, profiles, and accounts. If you’re worried you won’t remember them, use a password manager like LastPass to help.

4. organize photos

Is your camera roll a jumbled mess of random screenshots? There are some ways to easily sort and organize them, and these ways are changing constantly.

Whether you use filters and tags in your photos app or you sync them to something like Google Photos, it’s still important to go through them from time to time. Delete the accidental pictures or memes that you don’t need anymore.

Keeping only what you need keeps everything tidy. It will also help you find photos faster when you need them.

5. Audit your smart home appliances

All those smart lights and appliances are a part of your digital space. Could you be using them in a way to get even more energy savings out of them? Are there any smart features you aren’t using?

Smart appliances are a lot of fun, but make sure you are using them to their full potential.

6. Update digital subscriptions

Next, go through and check out what you are subscribed to. Do you still use it? Could you do without?

Sometimes these subscriptions are set to automatically renew and you could be paying for something you haven’t used all year.

The most common digital subscriptions include:

TV/Video – This includes Netflix, Disney+, Hulu. Can you combine them or do without one?
Amazon Subscribe and Save – Go through your Amazon account and look at your shipments. Do you still need them at this current rate?
Subscription Boxes – This includes things like Ipsy and StitchFix or Carnivore Club.
Apps – Some apps will continue to charge you if you delete the app without canceling your membership.
Online Workouts – Did you ever sign up for an online workout or diet program?

7. Back up important files

Finally, as you go through your digital life, make some backups of important files. Don’t rely only on cloud storage. If the cloud storage is erased you need to have your own backups.

One of the best ways to make a local backup is to use an external hard drive. Keep everything on it and store the hard drive in a fire-safe box.

The kind of things you want to back up include:

Photos
Taxes
Legal paperwork (divorce, custody, etc)
Work documents
Memories

Clean Up Your Digital Space in 7 Easy Steps

Organize your digital space and focus more

Some people claim that when their computers and phones are all organized, they are able to focus more when they work. I can understand how that’s true! When you take away all the mess, you are left with a clean and efficient place to work.

Struggling to get motivated? Sign up to get our FREE guide, The 30-Minute Organizing Secret, and discover easy ways to overcome the chaos of clutter – even with kids at home!

More Organization tips

After you clean up your digital life, here are some more ways to stay organized.