I am thinking of having a summer cleaning fest. Not necessarily one of physical items, though I’m sure I could find plenty of knickknacks to throw out. No, I am talking about a purge and clean up of my digital stuff. There is tons of it. Photos, music, movies, documents, code, and a whole bunch of other stuff sits on my desktop and on my different hard drives. The behavior of letting my digital household go uncleaned has slipped into my browsing habits and my smartphone usage. I keep way too many tabs open in Chrome and the number of apps on my iPhone has become ridiculous.
Starting today, I’m purging all of the extraneous stuff that I don’t need. I will be looking at my different applications on my computers and the different apps on my phone and flat out deleting those things which I do not use on a regular basis. I know there are a few apps that I have not used in months and they need to go. The same applies to bookmarks in my browser and files/folders on my hard drive.
I do not think it is just me that struggles with this. I have written things before about how we are being inundated with information and it is hard to filter out what is important. I have yet to succeed at becoming really good at filtering things like Twitter and Facebook but my move to clean up my devices is an attempt to filter where I go for information. It is the start of really focusing on what’s important and ignoring what isn’t. We’ll see how well I can do, I am known for holding on to things (trinkets, papers, etc.) and deleting things in the digital realm is just as hard for me.