According to the calendar it's spring, and with this season comes Spring cleaning right? You change out your wardrobe, linens for lighter materials and colors, and get rid of things you aren't using. With so much of our lives being in the digital space, we tend to do alot of work/communication on our tablets. laptops, and smartphones. Now you can't take a broom and duster to these things but like your house digital cleanup is something you can do too!
Clean up apps on your smartphone
This is an easy one, if you have pages and pages of apps on your smartphone, start by taking stock of whether or not you really use or need them. If you find that you do, then organize them into folders so you no what they are all for. For example, I've got a productivity folder, one for social media apps, one for games, one for fitness, and so on. But I've also noticed if I look at an app and can't remember the last time I opened it or used it, then chances are I don't need to keep it installed. If you're an iPhone user and you paid for the app, don't panic, you can delete the app and it's still apart of your iTunes account, it just won't take up space or clutter up your screen. *Tip: Apps like Facebook, and Instagram build up a cache of sorts on your phone, so if you delete them, then download them again, you'll free up some space*
Email out of hand?
Now this won't exactly fix your email problem entirely but on your device, check the Mail settings under Settings-->Mail, Contacts, and Calendars and if your email is configured through and Exchange server there is usually a setting for how many weeks of email to sync to your device. My suggestion if your cramped for space, take it down to 1 or 2 weeks. A lot of devices have it set to 1 month. Depending on how much email you get that's a lot of space! And if you find that your email inbox is becoming a beast on your computer, archive! If you work in cubicle nation in any capacity you know that eventually, they will send an email saying you're out of space. So a quarterly mail clean up isn't a bad idea on your personal email either.
"Get your head out of the clouds", and put your documents in it!
I can't stress enough the importance of having a cloud storage option. The worst thing that you can do is having all your documents, especially mission critical ones stored in one place. Not saying your hard drive is going to crash tonight but, technology is far from foolproof. If you don't want to "invest" per say, there are more than a few free options. Google for one, if you have a Gmail email address, you already have 15GB of free cloud storage via Google Drive. You can also download the Google Drive app for your tablet or smartphone so you can easily access or share files with others. Another option is DropBox, now this one doesn't have as much space for free, with just 2GB with the free plan, but it's very reliable and their Pro Plan at just $9.99/month gives you 1TB. I utilize both, because quite frankly I have documents I need to share for collaboration with Google Drive. Then with DropBox, I have access to my documents from my work computer, laptop, iPad..not to mention there is a level on integration with most apps that you don't get with Google Drive.
What are you going to do to clean up your digital space?
~ChicDivaGeek