How to Declutter and Organize Your Tech
How to Declutter and Organize Your Tech
1. Store or Sell
How much you might be kicking yourself if you got rid of your old school record-player or trashed your quaint Nokia phone from yesteryear. Such things have been making a resurgence in recent times; it’s only a matter of time before everything comes back into fashion, as with clothes. Either that, or they can serve as interesting talking-point with your grand-kids!
2. Store Data
It is important to have some sort of external drive on to which you can store all your important information when it comes time to selling, donating, or recycling an old lap-top or desk-top. If not, then you might be forced to lose memories forever, or resort to taking a blow-torch and sledge-hammer to destroy everything on that computer, for fear of identity theft.
3. Repair, Don’t Recycle
In our age, our first instinct is to throw it out and get a new one. It was not always the case, and it needn’t be now. By getting an independent computer shop to change or upgrade the capacity of your lap-top or desk-top you can get many more years’ use out of it. We do it with cars, so why don’t we consider doing it with expensive bits of tech?
4. Clear Browsing History Every Day
It might seem over-kill, but it’s surprising how much space your history takes up, and how many extra programs are being utilized, simply by not religiously clearing your browsing data as a force of habit. If you start doing this at the end of every session spent online then it will become second nature. It’s only two clicks!
5. Delete Space Wasting Documents
Trawl through your hard disk now and again, to delete two or three large unneeded files which might be lurking there. In the process of doing this you can clear out thousands of cache files and cookies which might be eating up valuable space on your device.
6. Remove Yourself from Mailing Lists
There will surely be a handful of mailing lists you want to be on, but most of them waste your time and inbox capacity with unwanted promotional messages and newsletters that need to be purged. The ‘Spam’ or ‘Block’ function on your e-mail account should be used and reviewed regularly.
7. Check Out What’s Running
Every time you start up your Mac or PC various programs start running automatically. This can be irritating, so spend just a little bit of time in your System Preferences (Mac) or Task Manager (PC) in order to disable anything which is taking the liberty of running without your express permission.
8. Move Photos
Photos and, for that matter videos, take up a lot of space. Consider either moving them to the Cloud, or keeping them on an external hard-drive. They take up a much larger amount of space than text-related documents, so that needs to be factored in order to maximize your device’s performance.
9. Trash CD Cases
If you have large numbers of CDs / DVDs, why not trash all the cases, keeping the inlay cards if desired, and move your collection into a few capacious sleeve wallets? This will reduce the space you need to store the music by about 90%, and your CDs / DVDs will function as photos in an album, rather than as annoying plastic cases which have to be stored like books on a shelf.
Hopefully these tips will help you to enjoy the benefits of tech without having it overrun your life. Remember, tech is there is serve us, not the other way round!