Digital declutter tips for busy mums
There’s a lot of digital admin when it comes to mum life, which can take up a lot of headspace, and cause a lot of stress. One way to manage your digital life is to do a digital declutter, which not only frees up headspace, but helps you be more organised.
If you feel overwhelmed by digital clutter, here are some simple digital decluttering tips you can try, which cover decluttering your phone, social media accounts, inbox, computer, and even your digital to do lists.
There’s also some information on how schedule regular digital decluttering sessions, so you can keep digital clutter to a minimum.
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Why is a digital declutter important?
So much of our lives are lived online, from emails, social media, research, managing a family calendar, setting up a family schedule, and so much more, it’s easy for us to miss important information.
Doing a digital declutter will help you to manage your online life by:
- Helping to easily find important information
- Removing unnecessary notifications that cause stress
- Helping devices to load faster
Here’s a digital decluttering checklist that you can work though, if you’d like to get your digital life under control.
Phone declutter
Here’s are some things you can do to declutter your phone:
Apps declutter
- Delete apps you’ve never used, or haven’t used in months
- Place your most used apps on your home screen
- For remaining apps, create folders and group similar apps in them, name the folders in a way that makes sense to you, eg health, banking, recipes
- Turn off non-essential notifications
Social media declutter
Decluttering your social media accounts means only following accounts that bring you value, or make you feel good.
Here are some ways you can declutter your social media accounts.
Unfollow accounts
Unfollow accounts that make you feel bad, or that you no longer want to follow.
Set scrolling time limits
If you want to limit the amount of time you spend scrolling social media, you can use your phone’s screen time settings to set a limit, or set a timer on your phone and stop scrolling when the timer goes off.
Leave groups and pages
Leave any Facebook groups you no longer find helpful, and unlike pages you’re no longer interested in.
Declutter phone photos
There are many photos on our phones that are duplicates, blurry, or we simply don’t need.
Spend 5 minutes every night going through the photos you took over the day and delete any you don’t want, which not only frees up space on your phone, but enables you to find photos you actually want.
To organise your phone’s photos, create folders and file photos within them, so you can find photos more easily.
Some photo folder examples are:
- Clothing inspiration
- Family
- Holidays
- Home project ideas
- Meals
- Screenshots
It’s also a great idea to back up your photos just in case something happens to your phone.
You can even print digital photos from your phone and frame them, if they’re especially sentimental.
Inbox declutter
Our inbox can become cluttered quickly, but doing an inbox declutter can free this clutter in no time.
Here are some ways you can declutter your inbox today.
Unsubscribe
We receive many emails we don’t read, or that we never even subscribed to in the first place.
Setting a timer for 15 minutes, going through your inbox and unsubscribing from unwanted emails, is a great way to declutter your inbox in no time.
Similarly, whenever you receive an unwanted email, unsubscribe from it straight away.
Archive or delete
Archive or delete any emails you no longer need, or that are no longer important.
Email folders
Creating folders for your emails is one of my favourite ways to clear my inbox.
You can create folders such as:
- Banking
- Bills
- Goals
- Health
- Kids
- School
- Travel
- Work
Once you’ve created folders, move emails from your inbox into their relevant folder, and whenever you receive a new email you want to keep, move it immediately into a folder once you’ve dealt with it.
Computer declutter
When thinking about how to declutter, don’t forget computer files, because a build-up of files can slow down your computer’s loading speed.
Here are a few things to add to your computer digital declutter checklist:
Files and downloads
Go through your files and downloads and do the following:
- Delete files you don’t need, that are outdated, or you no longer use
- Create folders and add files to them that you want to keep
- Back up your files on a cloud service, external drive, or flash drive, so you won’t loose anything if something happens to your computer
- Clear your desktop by deleting items you don’t need, and storing away items you do need in any of your newly created folders
Digital to do lists
Many of us, myself included, keep to do lists on our devices, which can lead to a lot of mental clutter.
You can streamline your digital to do lists by choosing one app to record your to do lists such as:
- Google Keep
- Todoist, which is what I currently use
- Trello
Set reminders
I set recurring reminders in Google Calendar so I don’t forget important things such as:
- Birthdays
- Decluttering checklist items I want to get to
- Extra-curricular activities
- Quick decluttering jobs
- Recurring appointments
- School PE days
Schedule regular digital declutters
Having regular digital decluttering sessions, such as once a week, will help you to keep on top of your digital life, and get into a digital decluttering mindset.
Here’s a quick checklist for decluttering your digital life that you can work through each week to keep digital clutter to a minimum:
- Delete phone apps, photos, and screenshots you no longer need
- Review your inbox and move emails to folders
- Add computer files that are important to a designated folder
- Remove items from digital to do lists you no longer need to do
- Empty your computer’s trash can
How to declutter your digital life – a recap
When your digital life is under control, it reduces a lot of mental load.
Taking small, consistent steps to keep on top of digital clutter, means you won’t forget important things, waste time scrolling, reduce device loading times, and so much more.
Whether setting scrolling limits, tackling your inbox, or organising files into easy-to-navigate folders, every little digital decluttering task adds up.
Additionally, scheduling regular digital decluttering sessions by following a digital declutter checklist like this one, will allow you to keep digital declutter to a minimum.
When did you last declutter your phone or computer?
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