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In an age of 256+ GB smartphones and seemingly unlimited cloud storage, you may have more digital clutter than mess IRL!  You may be starting to “spring clean” around your home, but have you considered decluttering your digital space as well? 

Decluttering our devices, which Americans spend over 8 hours a day on, can help them be more efficient, run smoother, and extend battery life and overall product lifespan—saving energy and saving you money in the long run. 

Decluttering your digital spaces can provide massive benefits to your mental health, financial wellness and the environment! Completing a comprehensive digital cleaning can be a monumental task, but here are some tips to help you declutter and stay organized. 

Personal Wellness:

• Get organized. Clearly label important digital documents to reduce the stress of finding and retrieving them. Disorganized physical and digital spaces can trigger high levels of stress and anxiety, making it hard to stay focused and productive.  
• Delete duplicate files. Then, set your digital “trashcan” to permanently delete on a regular basis, saving you time and energy in the future!

Financial Wellness: 

• Reduce the accumulation of new clutter by unsubscribing from email listservs. Every day, over 360 billion emails are sent and received, creating an estimated minimum of 10.8 million kg of CO2e. Plus, you won’t be tempted to impulse shop by email advertisements! 
• Uninstall unnecessary or rarely used apps to protect your information in case of data breaches or updates to those (seldom-read) terms and conditions. 

Environmental Wellness: 

• Set time limits on apps like social media to avoid overuse. Around the world, people watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos every day, resulting in 55 billion grams of CO2e produced. That’s the same amount of CO2 produced by driving to the moon 293 times!
• Reduce online streaming and instead consider downloading content or using physical media. Downloading means you only pull data from the server once and can watch the content multiple times without using extra data, including offline! Netflix users streamed 94 billion hours of content over six months, resulting in CO2e emissions, the equivalent of driving the distance between the Earth and the Sun over 140 times.