Digital Spring Cleaning: Getting Rid of “Just in Case” Clutter

Adrien Lemaire
4 min readMar 23, 2021
Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash

Hello Spring! This is usually a period when we’re looking for a kind of renewal. Spring cleaning is part of that process, so why not applying it to digital? Years after years, we accumulate so much information, so it’s important to clear it regularly.

We’re often keeping things “just in case”, including for digital activities. For example, subscriptions to newsletters we never read, old files or broken phones. Here are 5 ideas for a digital spring cleaning!

1 — Unfollow on social media

Between groups, contacts, pages, advertising, etc… your social media feeds are probably full of information you don’t care about.

Doing some cleaning from time to time is a must if you want to keep on seeing relevant information. It can be done really easily: while you’re using social media, just pay more attention to the news you’re not interested in. You can easily unfollow the contact or page which posted it.

Also, don’t hesitate to remove some contacts. The same applies to groups, pages, or anything that appears in your feed (for example, the hashtags you follow on LinkedIn or Instagram).

2 — Clean up your inbox

On your personal email, you probably receive lots of messages from companies. Between emails for administrative tasks (banks, post, insurance, etc…), newsletters, promotional emails, website accounts and more, we can quickly get bombarded with emails.

When we receive irrelevant emails, a default habit is deleting it. For the ones you never read, you can unsubscribe completely, usually via a link at the bottom. For example, this approach is relevant for newsletters you never read or promotional offers you never used.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Removing large emails is another way to clean your inbox and save some storage space. You can use filters to find emails with attachment (above 5 Mo for example), and remove the ones you don’t need anymore. Great news: this clean-up is also good for the planet!

3 — Reduce apps and…

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