Clutter in Cyberspace: Declutter and Organize Your Digital Stuff

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Big Buckets and Low-Hanging Fruit

This week’s assignment is to make headway in cleaning up email clutter. You won’t get it all done in one sitting, but let’s aim for one work session to reduce the volume of unprocessed messages:

• To help with your volume of unopened email, separate the old stuff from more current messages. Pick a date—one year back, or perhaps six months—before which you can say with reasonable certainty that there’s nothing that is likely to require critical action. Create a folder named “Needs Sorting—before xx-xx-xx date.” Sort your inbox by date received, then move everything before your cutoff date to this new folder. This step creates a separate backlog project that will need your attention later.
• For the more current items that remain in the inbox, aim for eliminating “low-hanging fruit.” Sort the email by sender, which shows you single senders with a high volume of email, such as newsletters, sales ads, and so on. You can delete whole chunks of email in one go. (In my inbox, it’s the Container Store ads!)
• Now concentrate on one day. Sort the emails by date received again, and look at the oldest date in the last two weeks (or whatever time period you consider the recent past) that you haven’t cleared from your inbox. Open all the messages from that day, and go through them to see whether any of them require action. Flag, file, or save messages as appropriate.
• For those of you for whom email isn’t a pressing problem, look at your downloads folder instead. Scan the downloaded files to see which ones are ready to be deleted. You’ve probably already saved the critical ones elsewhere, or completed the task for which you downloaded the file. Most of the downloaded files should be easy to delete!

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.