🧹✨ Digital Declutter Day: Clean Up Your Tech in Just 30 Minutes

Frank Bravo 0:08
Welcome to Your Tech Makeover, the podcast that gives you tips and tricks to help you simplify and get more out of the technology in your life. I'm your host, Frank Bravo. It's the end of the year, and it's the time where we clean out our closets, recycle old paperwork, and promise ourselves that we're going to keep things neat next year. So today we're going to do the digital version of that because it's Digital declutter day at your tech bake over a fast focused cleanup of your files, photos, apps, notifications, and yes, even your email, all in about 30 minutes. This episode won't be that long, but the task we're going to do will be able to be completed in that time. So why does this matter? If your phone is constantly warning about your storage or your laptop fan? Sounds like it's getting ready to take off. Or you just feel digitally cluttered. This episode is your reset button. Back in my troubleshooting 101 episode in September, we talked about quick cleanups to make your tech feel faster and lighter. Today, it's more intentional, just like decluttering your closet. You don't need to reorganize everything, you just need to clear out the stuff that's in your way. So here's how the 30 minute cleanup is going to work. Eight minutes on files and storage. Eight minutes on photos and media. Five minutes for your apps and notifications. And then we'll spend about nine minutes on email resets. And if you have an extra two minutes, there's a quick backup check. Because you know how I feel about backups. So let's get started. We're talking about files first because that's the biggest win. If you look into your downloads folder this is where you can make a lot of effort. I mean you can do a lot with very little effort. You can open that folder, sort by date and look for anything older than 90 days if you haven't touched it since summer. It can go delete it or move it to a folder called archive 2025. If you're even a little bit unsure, we're not going to agonize about those decisions today. We're not going to open up every single file, but make sure that if something you want to keep, if it's something you're going to keep. But as I always look at it, the downloads folder is something you've probably downloaded from the internet somewhere else, or it's from an email. So you probably have a copy saved somewhere that you could get another copy. So consider throwing away all the stuff all the time. Next is your desktop checkup. Make sure your desktop doesn't look like a clearance bin at the yard sale. Spend two minutes, literally two minutes. Set a timer if you need to, and either drag any stray files into a single folder called Desktop Cleanup or delete stuff you know you don't need. All of us can take a look at our desktop and know there are things we don't need. If you want, you can organize it later. But today it's about visual clutter cleanup and then you can look at large files. Large files take up all the space on your device, and you really probably don't need them, or there's probably some better place for them. You can sort folders by size usually, or at least look for very large files where, you know there might be, like your video files, screen recordings. If you have that two gigabyte video you meant to watch and you haven't yet. Maybe you should consider deleting it. Finally, let's do a quick cloud check. A cloud sync check. I should say whether you use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud drive. You know, I had a bunch of episodes about this just a little bit ago. You can go listen to those if you are curious about any of them, but you want to make sure that your sync icons are green or the cloud if you're not storing your files on your device, if something is stuck or there's a weird icon, the best thing you could do is right click on it, pause, and then resume the sink. This solves like 90% of the sink problems that happen. So there's a minute and your computer already feels lighter. A quick shout out to listeners like you who helped make your tech makeover possible. Your support helps keep this podcast going and I truly appreciate it. Want to contribute? Just click the link in the show notes or visit your tech makeover. Plus, as a special thank you, supporters who give $25 or more will give $25 off a one time consultation with me to help you simplify your tech. Thanks for being part of the Your Tech Makeover community. Now back to what I was saying. Now we'll take a look at your photos and your media. At this stage, we're not looking to organize your entire photo library, but rather take a quick look at the highest impact wins. So open your photo app and maybe look for screenshots first. These are the junk mail of your camera roll. If you're on an Apple device, you can open up the photos app and filter by screenshots. Delete them in batches. You probably don't need them anymore. Now let's look for duplicate images. A lot of photo apps have the ability to look for duplicate or similar images. Find that's in your photo software and merge the obvious or delete the ones that are duplicated. These are the ones that look identical or have the same photo taken like five times in a row. You can also delete the extra ones. Super easy this way. On an Apple device again, there is a duplicate photo feature that the newer versions of photos have that you can automatically and systematically merge them together. Now look for video monsters. These are usually those huge files. If you didn't catch them in the first set, maybe you can find them here. You can usually sort by size in your photo library or just view the videos. Either way, take a look at them. If there's ones that you know you don't want, you can just delete them there. A lot of times we get just random little clips of videos that we can just delete. If you have an extra time in your eight minutes, you can do this mini organizational step, which I means by that is by creating a few albums. Maybe something like keeper 2025 or print or Share and then move a few photos into them. That's it. Momentum. Not mastery at this stage, and it gives you the opportunity to add some structure now and come back later. Okay, eat more minutes down. How are we doing? Ready to continue. Let's keep going. In the next five minute block, you're going to look at your apps and look at the notifications. This is a quick but powerful reset. First, if you have apps you don't use anymore, you should just delete them. We all know that apps use that we use often and which ones we really like. And if you haven't used an app in six months, chances are they don't belong on your device anymore. The one exception to that might be a banking or a travel app. You might use those a lot less, but again, if you're never going back to Denver or fill in the city of your choice. Sorry, Denver, I didn't mean to pick on you, but that was the city I thought of first. You probably don't need the city guide that you downloaded for your device. Additionally, if you have two apps that do the same thing, like task management or notes, it's probably best to pick one and delete the other. So now let's silence the noise. That is, the notifications that come with all of these apps that we download. You can start by turning off notifications for anything that doesn't improve your life. For instance, if you're not a social media manager, you may want to consider turning off notifications from social media apps. If you want to be judicial about the shopping apps or the random limited time offers, this is where you'd go ahead and make those notifications go away. You probably want to keep notifications on for things like messages, calendars, banking reminders. You know, anything that you need to deal with immediately if they come in. And doing this will reduce your stress. And it's really more than you might expect five minutes later. Now your phone already feels calmer. Great job. So now let's talk about your email inbox. You can find on this podcast and in very many things that I've written earlier in episodes and documents about how I keep my inbox empty. Really, this is a tip in this section that is primarily based on that idea. Email clutter is the silent productivity killer. So let's do a quick reset. First, a power move is to sort by sender. I talk about this in my episode about email management. If you sort your inbox by sender and not by date, you can see large clusters of newsletters or promotions or delivery notices or updates you may never need again. This is a great way to potentially delete or at worst, archive. Lots of messages all at one time. You can literally clear hundreds of messages from your inbox if it has them in there in under a minute in this way. Next, look at your things that you're subscribed to and unsubscribe from a handful of senders. You can pick three. Just three. Pick the ones that you're always deleting without reading. We all have those things. Just single out those. And with this simple step, you can permanently reduce your inbox volume. Then clear out the low hanging fruit or password resets, calendar invites, expired promo codes, archive and delete them. You can get most of those the way that when we were sorted by sender. But if you missed any, you know, look around for those kind of things. And finally you can always do the clean slate move. I've had people do this and it works well for them to get to that zero inbox feeling. If your inbox is overwhelmed, you could create a folder called inbox 2025, move anything older than 30 days into that folder, or really just archive those messages. A lot of the email software. It doesn't matter if it's in a folder or if they're just archive. If you if you've thought you haven't lost something, you haven't. They're all still there. And it gives your inbox a fresh start. I've successfully done my inbox pretty clean for a lot of years, and staying close to that inbox zero has, and it has generally made my digital life calmer. Not perfect, but manageable. And that's the goal. All right, nine minutes done. And your inbox feels like new. So that's 30 minutes. And if you have an extra two minutes here's one more thing. The quick backup check. You know I wasn't going to leave this one out. I've talked about backup so many times on this podcast because it's so important. So let's start with your phone or your tablet. I'm going to have a whole episode about phone backup in a couple of weeks, but this is the preview of that. And so what you want to do first is make sure your automatic cloud backup ran within the last week, hopefully within the last days or even yesterday, if it hasn't, force a backup. Now on your computer. Check your backup software and make sure that it has recently made a successful backup. If there's an error or it hasn't run in a while, fix that today. Your future self will be very grateful. And if you don't have a backup, check out episodes on backups throughout my podcast. You'll be able to find one that is right for you and get one going today. There's no time like the present. That's two minutes that can save you a whole world of pain later on. So let's recap your 30 minute plus two digital declutter for files. You're going to clean out your downloads and desktop folders and archive anything that's big, or delete anything that's big. For photos. You're going to kill those screenshots, merge duplicates, and delete those huge videos that you maybe didn't catch during the file cleanup. For apps, you're going to delete the unused ones and silence those noisy notifications. For emails, you're going to sort by sender and delete those that you don't need. You're going to unsubscribe from at least three newsletters, and you may want to consider that clean slate move. And then as a bonus, there's the backup check. Two minutes equal a huge payoff later on. You don't need to be all perfectly done in order to get your 30 minutes finished. You just need to get started. So what part of the tech decluttering are you going to do first? Are you going to do them in order or skip around? Let me know. And as always, if you have ideas for topics you'd like me to cover on this podcast, please feel free to contact me via email at Frank at your Tech makeover.com. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to your tech makeover, if you haven't already. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform so that you don't miss an episode. You can also check out your Tech makeover.com, where you can see more information about this episode and other episodes that I've done. If you're on Substack, you may want to search for your tech makeover and subscribe to the newsletter there. And if you want to find out more about me, please visit Bravo. It's com. Until next time, I'm Frank Bravo, and this has been your tech makeover.