Digital Spring Cleaning Tips

When I think "spring cleaning" I generally tend to think about my closet. I want to get rid of the big bulky sweaters and scarves and replace them with pretty skirts, shorts, dresses and tanks. I don't know about you guys, but I haven't even begun to tackle my closet yet because only recently has it started warming up and really feeling like spring, so I think that'll be a project for this weekend! Something that did strike me a couple of weeks ago is that in addition to our closets, a lot of people "spring clean" their entire house, basically getting rid of old junk that's built up and organizing the things you need/use, but something we shouldn't forget about is digital spring cleaning!

So what do I mean?

1. Email- Go through your inbox and create folders, as many as you have to, to clear it out. I had a lot of messages that I would go back and refer to for various reasons just sitting in my inbox so I decided to add more folders to my sidebar and make it so that nothing but new messages would be sitting there waiting to get read, filed away, or deleted. Now I have folders such as, "Blog," "Recipes," "Online Orders," etc.

2. Bookmarks- Before I used websites like Pinterest and Bloglovin' I bookmarked EVERYTHING. I still bookmark a lot of stuff like articles, websites I don't want to forget and other things that just aren't "pin-able" or aren't blogs, but it's so nice to click on those bookmarks you made a year ago and see if they're still even there and/or relevant to you anymore and get rid of them if they aren't. I cleared out so many things from my bookmarks that I didn't care about anymore and were just making my list overwhelming. This is another great place to incorporate folders if you haven't already!

3. Document Folders, Blog Folders, Music, Pictures, etc- Here I'm talking about all of those things on your desktop. Sometimes I'm in a hurry and I'll make a folder, stick it on my desktop and work out of it from there- but that's not where it goes. I don't like a bunch of folders cluttering up my desktop so I routinely go through and place those folders in their proper homes. Also, pictures. I take a lot of pictures and I put each event into their own folders, but I also like to arrange by year, so I'll have every event from 2014 in a "2014" folder. The yearly folders are what I find myself slacking on and this is a great time to do any catch-up on any of your folders that you've made and start maintaining them.

4. Back up your files- An external hard drive should be your best friend. If you don't have one, you need to get one, or at least get a flash drive to put your most important documents on. My computer gives me an update once a month on when I need to back everything up and I'll be honest...sometimes I ignore it. It's so important to try to keep up with, though, because when I do back everything up, I just think about everything I could've lost since my last back up *shudders*.

5. Clear out your browsing history- We probably all know how to do this, but just go to your internet browser menu, hit "history" and then "clear browsing data" then a menu will pop up with a list of what exactly that entails (I use google chrome) and you can choose from that what you'll clear. A few of the options are, "Browsing History," "Download History," "Cookies," and "Passwords." Some people do this everyday, I don't do it that often, but its a good habit to have to wipe everything clean and try to keep yourself protected.

6. Empty your trash- This one is simple, I tend to forget to empty my trash and it'll build up (like right now for example when I pressed "empty" I had 814 files, yikes!). It's not that big of a deal, these things just take up space and it's just the frosting on the cake when you've done everything else and you clear out your trash!

I hope these tips helped! Most of us spend a lot of time on our computers and I know what a sense of relief I feel when I know everything is organized, in it's right place and cleared out! 

Happy Spring Cleaning!

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