Episode #141 - Digital Detox – Simplify Your Digital Life

Welcome come to organizing with these, where we simplify and organize our lives for the better. I'm Diana Mall, your host, here to guide you towards a more organized and enriching life. Together, let's explore practical strategies, inspiring stories, and expert advice to simplify every aspect of our lives. Are you ready to embark on this journey with ease? Let's start.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Organizing with Ease. I'm your host, Diana Mall. And today, we are diving into digital detox, decluttering your virtual world. If this is your first time tuning in, I welcome you. You've joined us at a perfect time as we tackle one of the most transformative aspects of getting organized for the new year.

For my seasoned listeners, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here as we continue our January series. Fresh beginnings start strong in 2025. Can you believe we're already halfway through January? So this is the perfect moment.

It's for a mid month refresh. Over the past few weeks, we focused on decluttering physical spaces, holiday decorations, nightstands, bookshelves, and high traffic areas like entryways and kitchen counters. If you've been participating in our thirty one day January decluttering challenge, I hope you're feeling a little bit lighter and much more in control. This week, we're shifting gears to focus on digital clutter. Our phones, desktops, and inboxes may not take up physical space, but when they're cluttered, they can create just as much stress and overwhelm as a messy home.

Whether you're staring at thousands of unread emails, struggling to find files, or juggling too many apps. I would think that the too many apps is what my children would say would be my problem. Just wanted to give you that inside little note there. This episode is all about creating a streamlined digital life for 2025. So let's start with why decluttering your digital life is so important.

Well, I don't know about you, but it's part of life now. It's part of working. Our devices and our tools are meant to make our lives much easier. But when they're disorganized, they can create unnecessary stress and actually slow us down. According to Adobe, the average person spends four point eight hours a day on their phone.

Some might think that that's really low, but for the average, that's pretty high. That's nearly a third of your waking hours. If your digital spaces are cluttered, that's a lot of time navigating chaos instead of focusing on what matters the most. Digital clutter isn't just about messy inboxes or desktops. It's about how we interact with our technology.

A cluttered phone or computer can make it harder to find what we need. It reduces our productivity and increases anxiety. But the good news what is the good news? Well, decluttering your digital spaces is often faster and easier than physical decluttering, and the results can be just as transformative. So we're gonna do like a detox, a digital detox for January.

Alright? And I've actually written down some steps. So we're gonna go step by step. Here we go. If you are away, just come back to me.

Just let's just kind of focus on this. We're going to declutter your inbox. And why does it matter? A messy inbox is like a messy desk. It's distracting and makes it hard to focus.

So we want to start by unsubscribing from those newsletters or promotions you no longer read. We wanna create folders for organization. Work, personal bills, kids activities. Then archive or delete old emails in bulk to clear the space. Now you're probably saying, well, I have about, like, 3,000 in my inbox, and I have, you know, I have more than one email address, which we all we all can relate.

Not all, but maybe most of us can. So what we wanna do is we wanna at least dedicate ten minutes a day this week to organizing your inbox until it feels somewhat manageable. But again, take little chunks, take one area, and focus on that. It will take some time, but in the beginning, you will see results. A mental note that this is what you want to address for your week.

You're gonna wanna organize your files and create a twenty twenty five folder. Now this is really important because if you have already a new folder for the new year, you will then now automatically put everything for this year into those specific folders. And it will eliminate all of those other folders, and it will not be commingling. So if you need to find something, it's readily available. So a filing system can make even simple tasks sometimes feel frustrating if it's cluttered, and we don't want that.

So that's why if you have a clear filing system within your inbox and or, you know, even on your phone, both of them, even if they sync together, If you have it earmarked for by the year, for this year twenty twenty five, then it makes it always easier to find what you're looking for. Move all those loose files on your desktop and into, like, a sort folder so then you know that these are the folders that you need to actually look into. Again, for 2025, I have for my finances at home, just to let you know how I have created some of my folders for 2025 already, I do have twenty twenty five photos. I have twenty twenty five projects, which is going to be for work and for personal. So I actually have subfolders for each one of those.

I do have for tax purposes for this year, which is, of course, tax filing for last year. But I do have that under finances. And then underneath there, again, I will do my tax documents and I have then my receipts. I will archive my older folders labeled 2024 into, like, a year labeled folders so that I know exactly that all of my folders that were for last year is actually in this one folder, and it's easy access without cluttering my current workspace. If you use clear, consistent naming like 2025 underscore tax underscore receipts underscore January, there you have your PDF, to make files easy to locate.

Then number three is to clean up your phone apps. This is I'm raising my hand on this one. I could tell you that for sure. And why does it matter? Because too many apps and notifications can drain your energy by looking at those little red notifications, and, actually, it can also slow down your phone.

One of the things that you might wanna look into as far as the action plan of this is to delete the apps you haven't used in the past three months. Then if you would like, there's different ways of actually utilizing and organizing your phone. You can group similar apps into folders like social, work, fitness, or shopping, and then you can turn off nonessential notifications to minimize the distractions. Also, you know, scheduling a do not disturb hours to create intentional screen time free moments is also very good. Another thing that you can do as far as organizing your phone screens, you can also do it by color, by the color of your apps.

You can get the widgets. You can get very creative on that. If you have teenage children or older, they can definitely help you make it much more aesthetically pleasing. Definitely wanna detox your social media. Social media can also either inspire you or it could actually overwhelm you.

So it depends on how it's curated. Right? So action plan for social media would be to unfollow accounts that no longer align with your values or your interests in the new year of 2025. You want to mute out accounts that trigger stress or comparison. Yes.

That actually is something that you might want to consider by muting those accounts. If you would like, you can actually set daily time limits for social media apps to avoid endless scrolling. But sometimes that endless scrolling is what we try to do just to kinda, like, take away for the moment of what you're doing. But that's where we lose our time, and we lose our productivity. So we wanna use tools to streamline your digital life.

And here I've actually come up with a list of six top six apps and tools to help you stay organized. That's what we wanna do. We wanna stay organized. Number one, I do I list it because I actually like it. It's Google Workspace.

You can create folders and drives for different areas of your life, use docs for notes or she and sheets for tracking finances or goals, and it's also readily available on your phone. So if there are any notes that you need to refer back to, you have easy access if you're out of the house and you're not in front of your computer. Dropbox is the same thing. You know, storage large files, photos, or important documents securely. Evernote is a good one to keep track of those to do lists, meeting notes, and creative ideas.

External hard drives to backup critical files from prior years 2024 and to store them safely is actually a really good idea to have. I actually have an external hard drive and I feel really good about the fact that if anything should happen to my computer, I do have, aside from all of the other backups, I do have the external hard drive of anything in the past. Trello is also good organizing your projects visually with boards and task lists and, of course, you know, Todoist as well for your lists to write down. Canva, actually, if you can believe it or not, you can create digital planners or family schedules for the year ahead. So take a look at Canva.

Combine these tools for a cohesive system. For example, you wanna maybe save scanned receipts to Dropbox. Maybe you wanna organize projects into Trello and then keep your personal notes into Evernote. So as you can tell, you have these three apps, and it's all keeping you organized within those specific apps. Now daily nightly habits for digital clarity.

Once you've decluttered, maintaining your progress is key. Here are some simple habits to keep your digital world tidy. You ready? Some daily habits. Spend five minutes deleting unnecessary email and move new files into their designated twenty twenty five folders right away.

Since you've already created the folders, if you have those emails, then just you know, and they don't need to be addressed. It's more of informative. Put them already in the folders that you have created. A nightly habit can be review your inbox and desktop for any clutter. Try to turn on that do not disturb mode just so that you can disconnect and recharge.

These habits really just take a few minutes, but they can actually save you hours of frustration. So just to let you know, I do have myself giving myself for emails. I do give myself in the morning to review them around 12:00 lunchtime and then later on in the afternoon. Because of work, I do make sure that I do look at them periodically and that's why I have my times hours looking at them. Sometimes people look at their emails every hour because it's work related and there might be time sensitive emails that need to be answered and addressed immediately.

But if you can give yourself more of a leeway of longer time periods of where you can look at your emails, that actually one might help you a lot as well. I at least recently worked with a client in December who felt completely overwhelmed by her digital declutter because her desktop, here we go, was covered in random files and her inbox had, drum roll, please, about 24,000 unread emails. Yes. So what we had to do is we had to start small, unsubscribing from emails, creating year labeled folders for documents, and archiving old emails. That did take some time.

It was a process. It really was. We also did a lot on the hard drive where we did an external hard drive so that she can save a lot of them on the external and not onto her computer so that she has more space and more memory because her memory on her computer was getting to that maximum capacity. She had a clear desktop and an organized inbox and a folder system, oh my gosh, here for the new year twenty twenty five. That made everything for her so easy so that she can jump start the new year.

So she actually was telling me that she was like her brain has finally caught up with with all of this now. Now that she's so organized in her digital world that this is like what she has called that's the power of a digital reset. I think that's awesome. It clears not just your vices but your mental space too. As part of the thirty one day January challenge of decluttering, focus on these digital tasks.

Declutter your inbox, unsubscribe, sort, and archive. Organize your desktop. Create twenty twenty five folders and clear old files. Clean up your phone, delete unused apps and set up folders. Detox your social media.

Unfollow, mute, and set time limits. These small steps can make a huge difference in how you approach your digital life in 2025. So let's take on this challenge for this week. You ready? To tackle one area of the digital clutter.

Your digital clutter, whether it's creating twenty twenty five folders, cleaning your inbox, organizing your phone, take the time to create a virtual space that supports your goals. Share your progress. I'd love to see your some of your before and afters and so that we can celebrate your wins together. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode. Digital clutter may not be visible as physical clutter, but its impact is just as real.

By creating organized systems for your inbox, files, and apps, you reclaim your time, reduce the stress, and you can feel ready to tackle the rest of 2025. Next week, we'll return back to physical spaces and talk about creating functional zones to make daily routines easier and more enjoyable. Until then, step by step, little by little, let's continue creating a year filled with clarity, calm, and transformation. Wishing you a week of digital If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe to Organizer with Ease podcast on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us grow and reach more listeners like you who are passionate about living their best lives.

And remember, a new episode comes out every Thursday at 8AM. So mark your your calendar and join us. Until next week, take care and keep shining bright.