In today’s world, a digital workspace declutter is necessary. With everything moving online, millions of files are saved such as homework, receipts, and random downloads. There’s also probably a thousand screenshots on your phone and backup storage. So, in today’s post, I will walk through how you can do a digital workspace declutter and organize your desktop space.
Understanding Digital Declutter
Before you do anything else, it is crucial to understand your starting point. Do you do a digital declutter once a week, once a month, or once a year? Maybe you’ve never done digital decluttering, and that’s why you turned to this post.
Having clutter in your digital workspace creates inefficiencies such as not finding files or the information you need due to poor organization and naming. It can get frustrating if it takes longer to find what you are looking for. It’s like sorting through a stack of papers with no order.
Common areas that create a lot of clutter are emails, downloads, and files. If you are like me and you tend to save everything on your desktop, it can get pretty messy pretty quickly.
Benefits of a Digital Declutter
The benefits are obvious, but a clean digital workspace helps to increase focus and reduce distractions. Because you can easily find what you are looking for, you are less likely to open a file that creates a whole new set of action items that need to get done.
It helps with time management and streamlining the workflow as well. Plus, it makes it easy to send files and share folders with someone else.
Lastly, from a psychological perspective, a clean digital workspace means a stress-free mind. Your digital workspace is your second brain so if there is chaos in the digital world, there will be a sense of chaos in your mind as well.
Now that you know your starting point and understanding, you can organize files accordingly.
Assess Your Current Digital Workspace
Do you have any organizational system set up or are all the files scattered everywhere? Take inventory of all the files, folders, and desktop items you need to organize. Trash any redundant, unnecessary, or outdated items that you don’t need. Then, if you have folders, start organizing them. For example, the first level of organization is between personal and professional documents. Depending on your goals, you can go further into organization details.
For your email, archive important emails that need to be saved and trash any promotional or spam emails that you don’t need.
Organized Based on Goals
Priority Driven Organization
If you need to organize files and tasks based on priorities in your digital workspace, then take this approach. Create four folders: high priority, medium priority, low priority, and completed. In each folder, create folders for each big project or task you need to work on. This way your files are organized by project and then by priority. As high-priority items get completed, you can move the files to other folders, or move the entire folder itself. Once a task or project is done, they can shift to the completed folder.
This way everything stays saved and organized. I use this method for work because I am working on multiple projects at once with various deadlines and tasks.
Life Based Organization
This is the method I use for my laptop. In this digital workspace organization, create folders based on major life areas such as school, health, family, bills, side hustles, etc. You will have many more initial folders in this digital workspace setup, however, it will make your life way more organized.
Within each folder, you can add relevant sub-folders. For instance, in the family folder, you might have sub-folders for each family member. In the side hustle folder, you can separate the different businesses you run. In the school folder, separate files by semester, and then classes.
You can see the hierarchy I created below: college —> academics —> semester —> class
Take a similar approach in your email by creating folders for different projects or areas of your life. You can have one for receipts, bills, long-term projects, and more.
Rename Files
The biggest organizational tip, and the most helpful one, is to make sure your file names are helpful to you.
Including key information or the year can help you quickly understand what the file contains without needing to click on it. For example, naming a file W2 2023 makes it easy to find tax-related information.
Final Thoughts
This mini tutorial on decluttering your digital workspace should help clean things up and keep them organized in the long run. Once you have a system in place, it is easy to keep with it.
So, find a digital workspace organization system that works for you because that is the tried and true method to keeping your space clean in the long run. I hope you found this to be helpful!
With love,
Aditi <3
Aditi Rani – Figuring Out Life in Your Twenties
*Disclaimer: This is not professional advice. Some links are affiliate. By clicking and/or purchasing, I may receive a commission. It does not alter the price or change your buyer experience.