Decluttering Your Digital Life

Feb 8, 2021

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INSIGHT

Digital Clutter Harms Mental Health

Digital clutter acts like physical clutter by creating disorder and frustration finding things.
It impacts mental health by increasing stress, anxiety, and overwhelm especially with ADHD.

ADVICE

Limit Email Processing

Process email only twice a day with intention, avoiding constant checking.
Do not treat email as a task manager; process or move tasks elsewhere immediately.

ANECDOTE

Email Open Like Interruptions

Leaving email open distracts like waiting for interruptions, lowering focus quality.
This is similar to trying to work while expecting kids to drop in anytime.

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We all have an idea of what clutter is - it's just all that stuff. It's that frustrating feeling when you can't find something just because there are too many other things to look through. Clutter is disorder.

While we typically see clutter as a physical thing - the junk on our desk. The pile in the corner of the room. The stuff spread out all over our counters - we can also experience its digital counterpart because we also amass a lot of stuff digitally.

Today we're going to start our journey of working on our decluttering our digital lives - in this episode, I am going to be focusing on email and the files on our computers - next week we'll be continuing this series with an episode on all those tabs we have open in our browsers. I also considered doing an episode on our phones, but for now, I'm just going to direct you to Episodes 17 & 18, How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly - although I'm definitely going to have to update those episodes at some point. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/digitaldeclutter This Episode's Top Tip

Digital clutter is just all that stuff that builds upon our devices. It can have a real effect on our mental health and is something to be especially aware of with ADHD because it can create a lot of distractions.
To help manage our email we want to work on processing our email only a few times a day and then making sure that when we do that we're not treating our email as a task manager → don't leave things in your email to do later, either put them in a real task manager or deal with them right then.
Work on creating actual organization for your files → by keeping your files in places that are logical for your brain to find them you make accessing your files easier when you need them.
Back up your files. Seriously, you don't want to lose something you've been working on because your computer crashed. There are a ton of services that make this process easier than ever now.