Digital Decluttering.

Let’s clear some phone space ?

Hello there,

I hope you’re having a great week.

This weekly newsletter writing thing is more difficult than I thought it would be.

I nearly forgot today.

But hey, a routine is a routine. So let’s stick to it, for now.

Speaking of which, I’d mentioned once that I have dedicated this year to minimalism.

Not the empty all my stuff kind of minimalism, but let go of things, bit by bit at my own comfort zone.

The first thing that I picked up was my mobile phone.

I hope it’s okay, if I speak about minimalism bit by bit each week in between because otherwise it’s a little monotonous.

So, anyway, where was I?

Yeah, my phone.

So, since I became a mom more than a year ago, my phone was always filled with images of my baby upto the last memory space left in it. This took a lot of time to declutter as I had to select pictures from a huge pile and all seemed to be my favourite.

But now, I put all the pictures that I want in favourites and delete the rest. So I have a few selected pictures in the photo gallery.

I had some apps which I never used, some videos , what’sapp data from ages, chats which I just preserved for memories etc.

So what I did was I deleted all my chats, mind you all my chats with my family and friends was also deleted.

I logged out of the groups that I wasn’t active in or that didn’t require for me to be there. This was tough, as logging out of some groups of family, friends or work can be tricky. But once done, this cleared out a lot of my mental space as well.

Next I switched to notes that had been made years ago.

I also deleted the social Media and news apps I no longer used like Facebook.

Next was to clear out the mails, only the important once were left.

I barely open my text messages so I deleted all the old messages and emptied that section too.

I also deleted all the alarm timings I had set and had been clogging my alarm app.

Another area where I focused was on deleting the extra contacts. The contacts which are no longer required were deleted.

Clearing this digital clutter was something that I had been holding onto for a very long time and finally I gathered enough strength to clear it out.

I felt so relieved after that and now I have made it a habit to delete the WhatsApp chats which are not required, I no longer keep them for the sake of “memory”, I delete the duplicate photos, the mails and call logs on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. It gives me so much relief.

So basically the following points can be kept in mind if you are considering to declutter your phone-

1. Message- delete all the messages other than a few important ones.

2. WhatsApp- keep the important chats and delete the rest. Do not save media for your groups. As you can choose selectively the pictures that you want to save. ‘Disappearing messages’ is a good option to automatically select the chats that can be deleted after 24 hours.

3. Apps- delete the apps that you haven’t opened in 2 weeks or more.

4. Photos- delete the duplicate photos first and slowly try and keep only 1-2 photos from an event.

5. Videos- delete the ones that no longer make you happy.

6. Mail and drive - delete the mails and documents that are spam, promotions and ads and all the mail that is irrelevant for future. Go through google drive and delete the irrelevant documents and photos and clean up your drive as well.

Try considering digital decluttering for a week or two and when it will becomes a habit you will feel really good.

Let me know if you have any other best practise or if you try it soon.

Happy Sunday!