Decluttering Your Life

Blazer: J.Crew (Similar HERE) // Sweater: Loft // Boots: Steve Madden // Jeans: Articles of Society // Purse: Kate Spade

Have you seen the new show on Netflix’s “Tidying Up”?? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it! She gives a methodology behind how to declutter items which I have find to be really helpful! It really inspired me to write this post because I felt like you can go even further than just decluttering your items.

I have started decluttering things that I touch or see every single day. Such as my phone and my computer. Taking it one step even further, decluttering my camera roll, my emails, my folders on my computer and even my apps!

While I 100% agree that having an organized home/space is important, you do leave your house and go to work or go other places throughout the week. But 1 thing that is always with you is your phone! Seeing you have 23,000 blaring red notifications on your emails or apps, gives this unconscious feeling of stress. So today I wanted to break this post into 2 different items that are with us all the time and the things I do to try and declutter it every 6 months or so.

Your Phone

Apps: Remove, Update, and Group! Three simple and quick things to do to declutter your phone.

1. First up go ahead and remove unused apps from your phone. When I mean unused, I mean you don’t look at it every single day or need it for work. We all have those stupid apps you downloaded once to play a game or might use when you are bored. But honestly you won’t so just delete them. If you really need them then you can quickly download them again.
2. Update the apps you have left on your phone. We all have those lingering update notifications and honestly they aren’t going anywhere. So if you have a fear of updating an app then let it go!
3. The last thing left to do is group all your apps together. The groups I have are Social, Work, Blog, Shopping, Travel, Exercise, and Finance. You could even use cute little emojis to signal what each group is!

Notifications: Settings! This is something most don’t know about but if you go into your notification settings, you can select which apps send you notifications. The ONLY notifications you should be getting are ones you ABSOLUTELY CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT KNOWING! I can not stress this enough because otherwise it gets way out of hand. For example, I have text notifications, work email only notifications, and one travel app notification. That is it! Not kidding. It saves me sooo much stress because I know if I get a notification then its important. All my social media notifications are turned off!

Camera Roll: Clear unwanted pictures using albums! Spend your night watching your favorite show and scroll through your camera album to find pictures you don’t need anymore. If you have an iPhone, it puts all your photos into different albums such as videos, selfies, Instagram, Snapchat, Live Photos, Portrait, Bursts, and Screenshots. I work through each album and clean them all up by deleting a ton of photos. This saves you so much space on your phone!

Your Computer

Emails: Unsubscribe, Empty Junk/Trash folder, and Set up folders! This might be a little time consuming but if you start working on it day by day then overtime it will all become organized.

1. Unsubscribe from those marketing emails of places you will probably not shop again! At the bottom of every email they send there is a place you can click “unsubscribe”. At night I will go through all the emails I trashed that day and find the ones I can unsubscribe from!
2. Once I am done with unsubscribing, I empty out my junk and trash. This might seem silly but some emails actually sit on your computer and use up space. Plus its another notification that has super high numbers so just go ahead and click “empty trash” real quick to clear them all.
3. Start creating folders for different groups of emails you get. I do this for my work email and it helps me stay very organized. You can even setup rules to send certain emails to certain folders so don’t have to move them yourself. I build my folders over time though. When I get a new topic of an email come in I create a new folder really quickly and drop the email in. Every Monday my “inbox” section is clear of emails or only have emails that have waiting tasks for me. I feel so much more organized for the week when I start my week off with an organized inbox!

Folders: Clean Up folders! Go through and quickly create folders for all the documents you have sitting on your desktop or in your documents folder. You can then quickly drop different documents into each folder and forget about them. Then when you look at your desktop or documents folder everything appears to be organized. Helps find things a lot quicker too.

Pictures: Any pictures you have on your laptop/desktop go ahead and move them to Google drive! Very very simple and helps to clear space on your computer. In Google drive you can then create folders and separate out all your photos from different events. Plus you will be able to access the photos from anywhere and not just your computer!

Hope this is all really helpful to get you started in organizing! I normally spend about an hour or 2 a time when I am watching TV just going through and decluttering my electronics. I can not tell you how less stressed I feel when I don’t have a ton of red dots blaring at my face when I look at my phone!

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