I am guessing we all have digital clutter of some kind. It varies from person to person, but it’s something we’re forced to deal with that previous generations could never have imagined. There is no doubt in my mind that digital clutter can negatively impact our ability to live a cozy life.

I’m in my last two weeks of summer vacation. I decided vanquishing a few forms of digital clutter was the most important thing I could do with the limited free time I have left.

Types of Digital Clutter

Digital clutter comes in many forms including:

• Photos on your phone
• Photos on your hard drive
• Emails
• Browser bookmarks
• Open browser tabs
• Ebooks
• Digital documents

I’ve been plugging away at my digital clutter the last few years so I have a pretty solid grip on most of those. The exception is photos on my hard drive, but I anticipate dealing with that over the coming months as we get ready for Caroline’s graduation and open house.

While I could do additional work on a few of those bulleted areas above, there was another form of digital clutter that has weighed heavily on me for literally years – blog posts in the Drafts folder.

Blog Posts in Draft

Yesterday I spent the entire day from around 8:00 a.m. until around 8:00 p.m. clearing out the Drafts folder on one of my websites. I processed about 130 draft posts which I explained over there. I cannot begin to express how mentally freeing it is to have removed all the ideas and possibilities from that Drafts folder. Now if I sit down to write a post, there is nothing else there. I’m only dealing with the one post in front of me that day.

My Drafts folder for Thinking About Theology stands at 89. Many of them are posts from my previous website (A Woman’s Freedom in Christ) which I haven’t finished republishing. Although smaller in number, that Drafts folder will probably take longer than what I did yesterday (for reasons I don’t need to bore you with). I’ll work on it today, but I doubt I’ll get through it all today unless I decide to delete with abandon. (That may very well happen just to get to zero by bedtime.) But after so much focused work yesterday, I’m not sure I have it in me to replicate it today. We’ll see.

The Drafts folder for the website you are reading currently stands at 541. Some of those ideas go back to when Caroline was a toddler.

One thing at a time.

Clear Out Your Digital Clutter

So what is your digital clutter? I would guess for a lot of people it is photos. But maybe it is something else.

Maybe you don’t have the opportunity to spend the better part of 12 hours focused on one thing like I did yesterday. So shoot for 12 minutes instead.

• You can delete or label a lot of photos in 12 minutes.
• You can dismiss a lot of bookmarks in 12 minutes.
• You can delete a lot of emails in 12 minutes.
• You can let go of a lot of ebooks you’ll never read in 12 minutes.
• You can close a lot of tabs in 12 minutes.

Whatever it is you need to do, I encourage you to vanquish some digital clutter today. Then come back and tell me in the comments what you did. I love hearing success stories!