Best Tips For Organizing Your Digital Life

As more and more aspects of your life becomes digital it is just as important to create a plan for organizing your digital life as it is to have a plan for organizing your physical spaces. With seemingly unlimited options, how do you know the best way to go about this? Here are a few best practice tips for organizing your digital life.

Choose a system. Probably the best system for organizing your digital life is the one you’ll actually choose. It can be tempting to always wait to have the latest and greatest, the shiny new system so to speak, but if you are constantly changing systems you risk having things fall through the crack. Research a few options, choose the one that best fits your needs and then go all in. A cloud based system is usually one of the better options but again, just having a system is better than no system at all.

Tidy regularly. In your physical space if you forget to tidy up it is easy to see the mess and be reminded that you need to set aside time to clean. In your digital life it can be difficult to see the mess. However, it is just as important to set aside time to tidy up your digital life. Regularly schedule time to delete old emails, remove downloads, clean up your desktop, and par down your camera roll. This helps ensure that when the time comes to find something, you have less digital content to sift through.

Label everything. Your digital organization is as useful as your labeling system. If you dump every photo you’ve ever taken into one folder, it is unlikely you will be able to find what you want later. Instead, use labels, keywords, and folders to help you identify what each photo or file is for easy retrieval later.

Perform backups. All the best digital organization in the world is useless if you never perform a backup and lose everything. You can have every single picture you’ve ever taken neatly organized into labeled folders and still lose them all if you don’t perform a backup. You can use a cloud service that automatically performs regular backups or schedule backups into your regular routine.

Even though it is more difficult to see the piles of clutter in a digital life because they are hidden away in folders, organizing your digital life is just as important as organizing your physical space.