Digital/Physical Information Cleanup
Anything I don’t care about, must go. Anything I do care about, must be absorbed and released.
Please note that this article was written in the past and added here to curate a list of all challenges I have completed.
This month I will spend at least 1 hour a day trying to read/listen/watch everything in my browser tabs across all my devices, clean up all email inboxes, and try and organize all my physical files.
Why this challenge?
I have developed a bad habit of being a digital hoarder. I keep articles that I think are useful, teach me something, or may help me improve my knowledge in a particular field. I also keep anything that seems cool or interesting to me at the time. However, I have not really gone back and look at them. With the influx of content that gets added to social media each day, I do not think to look back at old material.
This challenge is to help me try and clean up that bad habit. I want to declutter my browsers and apps with information that may or may not be valuable to me anymore. There is an unknown number of things saved in different places on all my devices that I have been “saving” for years without actually using them. I hope that going through all this information will provide me with inspiration or encouragement to improve my life. But it could also realistically turn out to be just a month of funny videos and similar content to what I would see if I just went to the timeline of any of my social media apps.
If there is information, I will try and use it for my year of learning and try to really understand the information and hopefully be able to use it in some way. If I decided to take a few extra seconds to save it somewhere, then it might have sparked something in me and I want to see if that spark is still there.
Before you Begin
The most difficult part about this challenge is figuring out where all this information is being saved or kept. There is probably information kept in several places that I really want to tidy up. I will take the information that I really like and want to keep in a physical journal. I may keep information digitally on notion (I would like to move everything to notion eventually since its such a cool app).
Here is an outline of all the places I have information:
- Work Laptop
- . — Browser tabs
- - Personal Laptop
- . — Browser tabs
- - Phone
- . — Safari
- . — Chrome
- . — Instagram (secondary account)
- . — Messages (to my iCloud)
- . — Notes
- - iPad
- . — Chrome
- . — Safari
- . — Notes (ones not connected to cloud)
- . — Gmail (articles tab, inbox)
- . — Google Drive
- . — PDF expert
- - Physical
- . — Documents in cupboard
- . — Under desk
- . — In backpacks
These are all the places I am going to check for material to be cleaned out. At a quick glance, there is more than 30 hours worth of content saved to get through. However, I may not need to read or complete something to its entirety to check if it is valuable or not. I am going to take an aggressive approach where if the information is not valid to me today and if I no longer see a need to understand or know something, I will get rid of it pretty quickly.
The Challenge
This challenge involves me literally going through all the things I use daily to find information that I have saved over the past several years and review it. If I no longer feel a certain way about the article, I will remove it. If I find it useful I will be documenting this information in a personal journal and note what I can do with the information provided and how I will incorporate it into my life.
If the article provides any tasks that I need to do physically (I may have a bunch of workout videos on my instagram tbh) that I will do those as well!
My Thoughts after completing the Challenge
Moving Forward
