Clean up your digital life
We often do clean ups in the physical parts of our life, like our home, but neglect the digital aspects. A clean up of your digital life can include your phone, computer and email inbox, which can make technology faster, easier and more enjoyable to use.
Phone
Our phones often get cluttered with unused apps, downloads, photos and videos and even messages. Start by checking the storage section of your phone, often in the settings, this will show you where the most of your memory is taken up and how much memory is left. This can help identify areas that needs to be focussed on, that take up the most storage.
Next work on deleting any apps that you no longer use, or apps that have a duplicate function of other ones. Then go into your photo and video collection and spend some time deleting anything that you aren’t happy with, no longer require, are duplicated and screen shots. This may take a lot of time but often frees up a lot of space on your phone. Lastly go into your messages. Go through and delete any old and unwanted messages.
After doing this clean up, you can check the phones storage again and see how much space you have freed up.
Please note: it is also a good idea to consider cloud storage such as Google Photos or iCloud or an external hard drive to back up all your memories on your phone and other devices.
Computer / Tablet
Your computer or tablet will also need a clean up. Move or delete files that are rarely used or no longer required. Check the downloads folder and either move or delete the files in here also. Remove or move the icons on your desktop if there are too many or simply consolidate them into like named folders.
Moving files into labelled folders, is like doing your filing. You can also move files to external storage, such as cloud storage or an external hard drive.
At the end of this, remember to ‘empty’ your recycle bin. This will properly delete all the files you have deleted.
Finally, it’s also a good idea to run a system update and restart your computer to help improve performance.
Email inboxes can get very full and it can be overwhelming to keep up to date with emails. It’s best to start with emails/ newsletters/ promotions that you are no longer interested in and then delete all of these. Then manually scroll through emails and delete or file anything you no longer need.
A simple way to clean up all emails is to sort your inbox emails by sender or date and then delete or file (archive) emails in groups.
Make sure to unsubscribe to all regular emails that you no longer wish to receive. This will ensure less emails and a tidier inbox in the future.
Also remember to go into different folders, such as spam or promotional or junk and delete and file these.
Another option is to set up automatic filters. This can help keep your email organised in the future. This can mean that priority emails are the only ones to go into your inbox and other emails go into other less important folders. Instructions to do this vary between different email providers, search for instructions online to help with this.
Digital security
It’s important to review your digital security. This includes:
- Checking that your virus protection software is up to date and renew it when needed.
- Update passwords and save them on a password manager
- Enable two-factor authentication for extra security.
- Delete any online accounts you no longer use.
This all helps protect your privacy and reduce a security risk.
If you spend a few hours every few months cleaning up your digital life you can make things a lot simpler, run better and much easier for yourself and others who share your devices. You will also gain back some storage space and in many cases improve performance.
Tip: Set a reminder to do a mini clean up every three-six months. A little maintenance on a regular basis goes a long way towards keeping your digital world clean.
For assistance with some of the computer terms used in this blog, please visit – https://www.cota.com.au/popular-computer-terms-and-their-meanings/
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