The bathroom is scrubbed. The kitchen is spotless. The curtains are freshly washed. The couch cushions are arranged just so. But what kind of mess is your digital life in?
I didn’t want to talk about this side of tidying until I’d managed to make it a steady habit. I’m good at announcing projects and effectively shooting myself in the foot when doing so because then I never get anywhere. With this one though, I’ve been steadily making headway for about a year now, so clearly I’m not about to give it up.
You might be following my series “The Quest to Tidy” which is all about my adventure in trying to use some of Marie Kondo’s tactics (dubbed the KonMari method) to tidy up my household once and for all. It’s been an on-again, off-again project since late last spring and while my house is not yet perfectly organized, her words inspired another project for me to work on. Digital tidying.
Take just a moment and evaluate your digital situation.
Here’s just a smidge of where mine started:
- YouTube “Watch Later” list is maxed out, and all with things I still plan on watching later
- Dropbox has become a loosely organized mess, with only a handful of things readily findable
- 2 of my email addresses are a disaster with 1,000s of emails from over the last 10 years that need properly deleting or archiving
- About 3/4 of my digital photos (if not more) are not organized in any searchable format (this number is well into the 1,000s too)
- My entire collection of CDs needs uploading so that I can backup the digital copies in case the physical copies fail
- There’s an entire external hard drive of every file from the time I was about 13 or 14 until 21 or 22, and this drive is the digital equivalent of dumping about 8 years of your life into a room with no rhyme or reason and walking away.
And that’s not everything.
How on earth am I supposed to feel truly at peace when my kitchen is clean but my digital life is a pig pen? Just because you don’t see the digital mess when you walk in my front door doesn’t mean the disorganization is not affecting me. It affects my mood and productivity and trickles down to much of the rest of my life in some way.
There’s only one solution… create my own process of setting out to organize my digital life too.
*Image taken from Pixabay, creative commons license, user geralt
lissaclouser.com 
I can understand having a messy digital life. I still have files which have multiple copies in far too many places ranging from artwork, to reference pictures, and many log files from role play and stories. One day, it will all be organized and filed properly so it can all be easily accessed.
Oh man… it was a couple of years ago I realized just how much of a mess my digital life was in. The key is to fight for progress in bite-sized pieces!
My whole summer has been about organizing my digital life… I made proper backups of everything, downsized my 14k of photos to 5k (and titled, added metadata and tags for easy reference), rated and properly tagged all my music in iTunes, cleaned out every email and to do list, and have been mostly keeping up with blogs (though I realize it is no longer feasible to read every single post from every single person I follow.) I actually made a list a year ago that was “Things I will do because I am OCD” as a joke… and ended up crossing every single one off this last month. 😛 You’ll get there! Good luck!
You are FAR much more organized than I am even trying to be! (Want to come organize my digital life? Maybe you should be writing these posts…) But congratulations on marking everything off on that list! That is a HUGE accomplishment! And I imagine a huge sigh of relief on your part too. =)
I spent a big chunk of my summer clearing out my oldest email account – I had more than 500 emails in my inbox that have been read but not deleted. Ahhhh! It felt good to get that monster under control! 🙂
Congratulations!! That’s a big accomplishment!
Pingback: Tidying Your Digital Life: The Pros and Cons of the Process |