5 steps to clean up your digital space before the year ends

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Green the Web podcast. This is the last episode of this year. I can't believe how fast this year has gone by and today we will clean up. Just one year is enough time to accumulate a lot of things and little trash is definitely one of those things before the year comes to an end, some data junk needs to go. So in this episode you'll find a step by step plan on what topics to think of and what data trash to look out for. We will clean up your emails, your cloud, your laptop, your smartphone, your website, and your social media accounts. We will clean up all of those things. And yet just free yourself from old data junk and start the new year light weight. I'm Sandy Dähnert, as always, your host of this podcast, a very passionate, sustainable UX/UI designer. And let's get this ball rolling.

First of all, let's start a little bit before we clean up with what are even the benefits of cutting your digital calories. And it is extremely awesome for your mind. You probably know how you feel when you clean up your house, your home, your garden, whatever you're cleaning up your desk. And it feels really liberating and great and energizing afterwards. And it brings a new light to shine. It creates space and freedom of clutter. And we want to bring that into our digital spaces as well. It really concludes in a calm, clear and relaxed mind, and that is what we need for starting into a new year. It definitely elevates your productivity and your structure. It gives you the control over your digital data. I know plenty of people who have lost this control of their emails, of their laptops, of their smartphones, and they're like, It's just too much. I could never bring back structure into it. But yes, you can. Everyone can. And you just start with baby steps and once in a while you clean up a little bit and then at some point you're actually free of all of this clutter. Second, benefit of reducing your digital calories is, yeah, it's great for the planet and every data on your laptop phone website cloud, it all uses energy either from your device itself or from massive data servers that run 24 seven on electricity. And you can change that. And even if your emails, images, videos, documents and all kinds of other data are just laying there, energy is used to host them if they are, for example, in a cloud. And for example, an average email comes up with around about four grams of CO2 in her life cycle and emails with attachments and around about 50 grams of CO2. That sounds really small, but with approximately 100 emails a day, an average office worker emits this way super roughly more or less, 150 kilograms of CO2 per year. Just with emails. Isn't that crazy? Just with emails. It's insane actually. Second step to do before we get into the actual cleanup is to set an intention. And this sounds maybe weird, but it always helps me, and I know it also helps a lot of others to set an intention before you go into the cleanup. So close your eyes if it fits your situation right now, take a deep breath in through your nose and a deep breath out through your mouth and release tension. Release the stress and the thoughts you don't need right now and focus for just one minute on your breath and on your body. And know that everything's going to be all right. Don't feel overwhelmed with the data, your hosting, with the emails you're having with images and documents that are on your smartphone. It's all fine. It's all okay. And set an intention. For this clean up. Maybe it's just the intention to start getting an easy way into cleanups in general. Maybe you want to have this full blown. Give me 2 hours of my life and I clean up everything and I want to get rid of every junk that I have. Maybe it's somewhere in between, but set an intention for what you're actually going for. Okay, cool. So we got that. And then the third step before we do the actual cleanup is a little preparation. And there are two questions to keep in mind during the cleanup. One is, do I really need this document, this image, this email to ask over and over and over and over and over again. And the second question is what? Well, you has this piece of data for me, and it can be an emotional value as well. And it's absolutely fine to keep things and to not feel pressured to delete things you might still need. And for the things you're not sure about. Back up your data, download your PDFs, documents, receipts, and more that you have on your cloud or on your phone, and just to keep them safe somewhere to create an archive folder for emails, for documents and other data you are not sure about yet. You know that maybe from your clothes. And you have this pile of clothes that you think you will get rid of, but you keep them for a couple of months and after a couple of months you will look through that pile again and you find things you're like, Oh, yeah, I really want to wear that again. And the other ones, I don't really care about them anymore. I can really get rid of them. That's the same with our digital data. You can do exactly the same and have an archive folder or archive setting somewhere to put your not sure things in there. And if you want to have a fourth task before we get into the cleanup, you can also track your reduction and write down your currently used data storage in your phone and your apps and your laptop on your cloud and everything that you're going to clean up. Just have a look. How much data is there actually currently, how many megabytes and gigabytes you're actually using currently? Write that down to have this comparison at the end. Maybe also the number of emails you're having just for a little bit of more of a celebration feeling at the end because it's always quite interesting how much we can clean up in a very short amount of time. Awesome. So now the actual cleaning starts. Finally, we get into the clean up mode. And just so you know, one step at a time is absolutely fine. These are all just suggestions that I'm going to mention. And you don't have to do them all at the same time. There is no perfection. There is no right or wrong. I just want to give you a couple of steps that you can think of and how to think of them to help you in this whole section. And you can also find a blog article in my blog. I will link it in the description where you can find all the steps that I'm going through to to do them while you're on the run and not having to listen to this podcast episode the whole time when you're cleaning up and trying to remember something, but you have it written down as well. In my blog on Green, the Webcam and linked in the description. So let's start with emails. Emails is one of the things that it got a little bit out of control, I would say. And I know so many people, especially in business realms, that have the fullest inbox that you can just imagine. I've heard once a colleague having 25,000 emails in her inbox and a lot of them being unread. That's massive. I think we don't have to talk about how massive that is and how many of those emails definitely could have been deleted and how overwhelming that can feel like for sure. Absolutely. Get that. So we do some easy steps to get rid of those hundreds and thousands of emails. One step is deleting emails you don't need anymore. That could be, for example, old email threats like to keep only the newest email of an email thread. If that's really necessary, you get all of those out of office replies. You get emails with huge data attachments. You can filter that in your email program with the biggest files attached to emails. You have marketing emails or email notifications from LinkedIn, from meet ups, from tools you're using, from social media like Instagram and Facebook and Tik Tok and all those other social media is out there. You have appointment emails that you definitely don't need anymore. You have all those emails that you can search for, like even just going through all the social media and meet up and tool names that you have and typing that in. Having all of them at once and deleting just this whole junk. It's quite easy actually, to go through a couple of things and just searching for it, looking through if there's anything that you might still need and wanted to save and then just deleting the rest of it. All those marketing emails, email notifications, huge data attachments that you can download and put somewhere else and you would probably never find them in your emails anyways again. So just putting that all in there and deleting it. Search by sender, search by date, search by size or subject and select all check for anything important and then delete searching for it. Date For example, you probably don't need any email that's not personal that you want to keep. But yeah, from 2015 or later than that, probably don't need that anymore. Second step for your emails is to deleting all the drafts. Look through them. Maybe you will need some of them still. But most of the times we have some drafts that are just lying around there that were automatically saved and we don't even know about them. Delete them. The same goes for your junk or spam folder. Delete everything that's in there. You probably don't need that. You can block all unwanted email senders that you feel like. Yeah, I definitely don't want to get any emails from those ones anymore. You unsubscribe from newsletters. That's one big thing that I usually do after holidays, because then I see, okay, there are so many newsletters that just came in, but I don't even look at them anymore. Or it's currently not the time that I'm into certain aspects of it. So just unsubscribe from those newsletters that you haven't opened in a while and just keep deleting ones there in your inbox and you just delete them. That's most often the fastest way to get rid of those, but they don't need to be delivered to you in the first place. So just unsubscribe and you have a lot less clutter. Amazing. And once you've done all of that, you empty the trash. You empty the trash folder of your emails. Really simple. Really basic. And then one more thing that's not really related to incoming emails, but outgoing emails is eliminating images and graphics from your signature. And I know it's a marketing technique and tool to do, but every image or graphic adds a couple of kilobytes to every email you send, and most of the times they are just displayed as white boxes as most people block the automatic download of images and emails. So you send a lot of kilobytes that aren't even looked at and we can stop that. It's when you think about the amount of emails you send every year with those additional images and graphics. That's a lot of kilobytes that are not really necessary and only text signatures are absolutely fine and sufficient and everything everyone needs because when is someone really looking? Through your signature, you can still add like different colors and characters on your keyboard, but trying to not use images and graphics and definitely no videos or anything larger than that. Think about it. Our second part of today's clean up is the cloud, and we put a lot of things in the cloud in the last I don't know when did it get really big in the last three, four or five years that we started putting everything into the cloud and having automatic image uploads from our smartphones and all of those things. Usually we don't need that. So the clutter, your data that can be old versions of documents duplicates data you don't need anymore, that's in your cloud. Just really look through what you actually have hosted in your cloud. That's always stored there, but you definitely don't need anymore anything that's outdated that should be in an archive. Download it. And migrated to an external hard drive because on an external hard drive, there's no hosting providers involved. It's not hosted somewhere where it needs energy. It's just on this external hard drive. It's laying there. That's okay to have it there. If there's no reason to have it on the cloud, just put it somewhere else where it's secure. This could be, for example, high resolution images that you don't need frequent access to. It could be your outdated and old versions of documents. It could be to have doubles of anything you have on your laptop. Just don't put it in your cloud. If you don't need regular access or someone else in your team needs access to and switch to a greener cloud. This could be, for example, self hosted clouds like next cloud. You can host yourself on your own green hosting provider. Or you switch from anything that's Dropbox or Amazon to, for example, Microsoft or Adobe. Google is also fine in terms of ecological sustainability, but not that much with data privacy. Pick and choose, of course, what's best for you. But yeah, definitely wouldn't go. Definitely wouldn't go for Dropbox. I did have that in the past, but I went away from that and wouldn't go for Amazon as well. But more the other choices like Microsoft or maybe also Adobe. And also check your automations that are sent to your cloud. For example, your images from your smartphone. Do you really need that? Do you really need all of this data from your smartphone in your cloud? Probably not. So see, if you really Yeah. If you can declutter some of those things. The third section of our clean up today is your laptop, Clean up your data on your laptop. It's really easy. It's the same as with the cloud. Old versions of documents duplicates, data you don't need anymore download folders. Those are fun document folders, images, videos, music, all of those things that you might have on your laptop that is slowing down your laptop. The laptop cannot function the same way as if there is a lot less data on it. So declutter it and really get rid of the things you don't need anymore. I know, for example, the downloads folder can be quite hard to go through, but it's really liberating to have a clearer structure on your computer and really going through those things helps tremendously with your mind and even just looking at the desktop of your laptop. And if you see thousands of files on the first impression on your laptop, then you know you have a slight problem. Clean it up, put it in folders, bring structures to your computer, to your laptop, optimize your folder and document structures. You can create a structure you can truly work with, put personal things in a personal folder, put work things in the work folder, put tax things in a tax folder, put specific topics in certain folders, and build your structure around it. There is a couple of YouTube videos and all kinds of other checklists you can find in the internet how to do such a thing, but really have a structure and put the things there immediately. As you download something or you create something and not place it everywhere where you can't find it anymore at some point. Yeah. Just organize those things. It helps. I promise. Next up is emptying the trash again. This is really, really liberating to see all of those files that you can go through once again, if you need anything of that, and then just click delete. It feels amazing. Can't recommend it enough. Another thing on your laptop is also your browser history, your browser cache, decluttering, bookmarks, closing all tabs. Wow, that's a massive one. Best of it is daily. I don't really do that daily and just. Yeah, sometimes it takes me a while to really close all the tabs, but once I do it amazing. Especially end of the year. Do it close all taps. And then kick out unnecessary browser extensions. All of those junk pieces that are just cluttering everything, get rid of it. Reassess your notifications. For example, mute email and software notifications that challenge your focus or set quiet time settings in your laptop. It's really easy to do really quickly done, then run updates on your software and your system updates. Uninstall software that you don't use anymore because it's also cluttering your laptop and migrate data to an external hard drive that you just don't need. Again, high resolution images that you don't need frequent access to or any archived documents that you don't need on a regular basis. Just put it on an external hard drive. It has a nice life there once in a while. Clean up this external hard drive as well. Really recommend it to do that. Yeah, but don't host everything on your laptop. Next topic is your smartphone or your tablet as well. If you're using that a lot and this is really fun to do, starting for most of us all with images and videos. Yeah, there's a lot of images and videos that we send around that we took in the last years. See if there's any blurry images, any videos that you took randomly and you didn't like. You originally wanted to just have an image and you press the video button or anything like that. Any images that you have replicates of you probably don't need that. And just delete some of those things that you definitely can get rid of. We don't need trillions of images that we don't look at anymore in the future. Usually when we have a smaller amount of images in videos than we actually watch them and go back to them and remember, Oh yeah, that was a wonderful vacation or that was an amazing moment that we had used that, save that and get rid of the rest that you don't really need and feel connected to. Same goes for music, old versions of documents and just any kind of data that you don't need anymore as well. Have a look into your download folder that's probably full of junk and just delete it. Also, declutter your messenger chats like chats and group chats on WhatsApp, on signal on Facebook and other messenger chats that you're using and delete some of those chats with people you have no connection with or a group chats that you can step out of and delete the whole chat because it was just for a random birthday. Yeah. That can be deleted. It's amazing. And frees your mind. Can't recommend it enough. Same is with cleaning your browser again, reassessing your notifications really heavily recommended for your smartphone to putting mute and focused notification settings. Same as for running updates and reassessing apps like deleting apps you don't use anymore. Clearing the cache of your apps and just really thinking about how many apps you actually use on a regular basis. And the ones that you can just get rid of delete. It's fine to live without them. Same as with the laptop. Optimize your folder and document structures. For example, you can have folders for specific vacations you took for specific years, for example, a folder for 2022 and putting all of those images and videos in there. Or your summer vacation or your Christmas party. Putting them in one spot. Finding a structure for your documents, for your images, for your videos, for your music. Putting it there and yeah, just having it clear a mind around it. And one more thing. If you have an OLED display, smartphone or tablet, you can also switch to dark mode and that is only suggested for OLED displays as in OLED displays. Every light bulb is lighted up individually. That's different from LED displays. And of course dark colors don't need as much light as white colours. If your eyes are really into dark mode and have it easier to work with dark mode because not every eyes are liking it and that's absolutely fine. Then you start mode. It saves energy for your device and is really nice to have if your eyes like that. And then we get to the fourth part of our clean up. It's social media, and a lot of people don't really think about social media and cleaning up there. And yeah, it's kind of fine, but there is a huge potential that we can use. And one thing in social media is to de-clutter your posts. Any old and unnecessary post really thinking quality over quantity you can actually delete. You can delete all of those posts that you put up in the first weeks of your Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn account life. And do you think, okay, this is really outdated, I can get rid of it, so do it, delete it. I regularly actually delete old posts of mine because they don't need to be hosted somewhere. They are lying around somewhere on some servers that are needed to be run by energy and cooled down with water or energy just so you have them. And often in most accounts people don't even get to the beginnings of those social media accounts anymore. So it's absolutely unnecessary that those posts are still there. So get rid of them. Really easy to do. Second thing in social media is re-assessing your notifications. That's the same as with the other things that I said before. Mute notifications that challenge your focus, mute anything that comes in on your laptop, on your smartphone that comes up or in your emails that comes up from social media that you originally just click away or that steals your focus from tasks that you're doing. So just muted, set it on, not send off whatever there is as a function. Do that. And then the third thing in social media is kicking out social media followers. This might sound weird. I absolutely get that. But you can kick out every fake and spam profile that is following you and that you definitely don't need just to have bigger numbers. They are fake anyways. And also some social media followers that you're really you really would like to get rid of. Just delete them. Easy to do. So every time you post something, it doesn't get shown in their timeline. And then last but not least, let's clean up your website. If you have any kind of web presence, then clean up that as well. If you, for example, hosting on WordPress or any other kind of content management system, then declutter your back end, like empty the trash, delete unused media files like images and videos that you don't use anymore on any pages they lead your drafts, delete page revisions. You can actually do that. There's even, for example, in WordPress, I know there is a plugin WordPress optimized, I think it's called where you have those features that you can delete page revisions, delete everything that you don't need anymore. Run all the updates for plugins, for themes, for system updates and declutter all the plugins and delete deactivated ones, Delete unnecessary plugins or search for more lightweight alternatives. If you know there is a plugin that's really heavy on my website, just try to find a more lightweight one. Yeah, that's more of not a cleanup kind of way, but exchanging things. But still, if you're in it anyways, you can go for that task as well. But delete everything that you really don't need anymore. And if you're in it, then you can also compress images and videos, podcasts or any other data intensive elements. There's even plug ins for WordPress again, that you can use, for example, short pixel or smart or optimal or desktop tools like handbrake. You can try out those things to compress your images and videos and data, heavy elements and yeah, just go through those things to clean up, clean the data that you're having. And that's pretty much it. What you have to do for your digital cleaning. I would suggest to also go through your digital office like decluttering your management tools and to do lists like deleting any outdated and not done task in Asana and Trello and all the other digital to do lists to really clean up your design documents, for example, with all those hundreds of hidden elements. I know that they there with some designers, more with some designers for less, but I know that they are there and just reassessing your document workflows, for example, not sending big documents as email attachments because then they are lying around there in your inbox and the recipient's inbox. Choosing a greener cloud to work with, deleting all design versions, doing all of those things that are probably involved in the other digital cleaning parts we just talked about. But just so to mention it at the very end, really thinking about that as well, wherever you find those little nitty gritty things and corners of your digital space where you can still delete and declutter things, do it, use that. And after you've done your digital cleanup, come back to your intention that you took in the first place and think about that intention, how it feels after you've done the cleanup and how do you want to continue, like set yourself reminders for your own future cleanups? Go ahead and set yourself reminders in your calendar. Set one or two big reminders in spring and at the end of the year, set smaller reminders for specific tasks such as cleaning your folder structure at the end of every month or integrating digital detox days if you feel like it. And yeah, seeing if there's any notifications that you have to reassess on your regular basis, do that. Really think about what can I do to bring in more structure and decluttering in everyday life for every month of the year or specific times of the year? I usually do big cleanups in spring and at the end of the year that's my biggest ones and do regular little cleanups in between. To never get to this point where I feel overwhelmed with having lost all of control of my data because I really don't like that feeling of it. And then last but not least, it's really about enjoying every clean up and the ease, the liberation, the clear mind that comes with cleaning up your digital spaces. It feels it feels so beautiful. After that, maybe I have a problem, but it really does feel really, really nice afterwards. You might know this feeling and just reminding yourself it really feels good. Once I've done it, I know it can be tough during structuring and deleting things, but as I said in the beginning, doing baby steps is absolutely fine. Start with your emails, then go to your smartphone, then go to your cloud and then go to your website. Whatever feels right and a certain day or a certain week. Just do parts of it. Just get into the little nitty gritty once in a while, and then at some point it's all gone, the trash is gone. And as I said, you can read about all of those five steps that I just said in my blog post, on my blog on Green, the Web.com. You will find the link in the description below. And if you'd like to dig deeper into the digital cleanup topic, then you can also scroll through the page of Digital World Cleanup Day. I will link it in the description below as well and you can join Aimee's and DAVIES monthly digital cleanups that they are doing in their digital echo partner community. The next one is on December 21st and they do a digital cleanup every month together with a couple of equal partners. And it's quite fun to do that with other people together and enjoying and celebrating together. So just to sum it up, there's five steps to clean up your digital space that are emails, your cloud, your laptop, your smartphone, your website, and your social media accounts. Before you do it, clean up, set yourself an intention. Prepare yourself to have archive folders or structures to host things that you're not sure about yet. And afterwards, coming back to this intention and really celebrating your clean up, no matter how small, no matter how big. Set up your reminders and set up your little pieces here and there to get into the clean up, maybe taking full 4 hours to do a deep dive cleanup or to do just the little steps. Both is absolutely fine. Just try it out and I hope I can motivate you to do that, especially at the end of the year, as it's just feels so much better to go into a new year without having all of this data junk, but no pressure. It's absolutely fine. If you don't do it at the end of the year, you can do it always and find your own times for it. And this is it for this year. This was the last episode and we will see each other in the new Year with new topics. And you know, you can always send me your questions that I put in the podcast and maybe you have even single episodes about just let me know via email or via LinkedIn, via Instagram. Just send me a message. I'm happy to hear about your questions and feedback and topics. And just so you know, next year there will be lots of cool things that will be coming from Green, the web, and so many more possibilities and options to learn more about green UX design ecologically and socially sustainable design in general. I'm really excited for our next year. It's going to be epic and can't wait to share more about it with you in January. Just needing to build some structure and getting prepared for a couple of things, but it's going to be exciting. And that's it for today's episode. As you know, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't subscribed yet. Share this episode with everyone you're knowing and feel like they could definitely want to hear about those topics. Give this podcast a rating. This really, really, really helps to let others know that this podcast is existing. Follow me on Instagram at Green, the Web. Check out the resources on my website. There's tons of free resources there. Share the love, spread the joy and rate comment and please let me know what you got out of this podcast episode today. I'm really curious and love your feedback when you send me some. Really, really honoring that. And I'm very grateful for this year and very grateful for you who is listening. Thank you so much for being part of my world and thank you for letting me be part of your world. Can't wait to share more with you and see you in the next year. Have wonderful holidays and a wonderful New Year's Eve. See you in January.