You know how there’s a National holiday for basically anything and everything? Well, today is National Clean Up Your Computer Day and I’m so here for it. My desktop looks like hoarders, digital version. And my email inbox contains approximately 5,360 messages. That is the ACTUAL number. Don’t believe me, see the photo. Ugh.
In an effort to pass on the love today, I thought I’d share some digital cleaning tricks and tips and show you how I’m partaking in this arbitrary little “holiday” today.
First and foremost, we need to have the back-up conversation. I can not stress to you how important it is that you backup as much as you can before starting this process. I have a free subscription to Dropbox that holds a few of my most important files. After this clean-up process though, I’m planning to move several of my design/graphic and stock photo files to dropbox and upgrade to the 1T of storage for $9 month. There is a free trial if you’d like to give it a shot. It’s actually completely free if you need less than 2GB of storage anyway. That’s plenty to store just a few of your most important documents. And as a side note, Dropbox is one of the easiest ways to transfer large files back and forth between two people. I use it for sending large copies of HOA documents to other real estate agents and for sharing photos/video.
We also have a paid iCloud storage account for all our photos and music. Love this and highly recommend it for any iPhone/Mac computer users out there. It’s seamless and anytime I get a new computer or phone, I just input my account info and BAM there are all the goods. Super simple.
So. Step 1, backup yo’ files, people!
Step 2. Declutter your email. If your inbox gives you a headache, then you need to get rid of a lot of it. 95% of the mail I receive is total junk. If you use your phone a lot for email, then you should start this declutter process by downloading “Unroll” from the App Store. You’ll have to know your Apple ID and password to get started with that app. It’s so worth it though. Took me about 10 minutes from set-up to finish to un-enroll from over 80 emails. It also creates a daily “roll up” email for you with the store emails you’d like to keep and just combine into one summary email. Pretty cool stuff, and really easy once you get it setup.
Then I went into my desktop email and started with my mammoth inbox. Deleting all the spam and crap I don’t need. I started that process a few days ago, so it’s not something that can be done all in one shot if you need to physically go through the emails to make sure you don’t delete something important. Anything I wanted to file in the appropriate folder, I did that. Anything that needs attention received a red flag to address it later. This is an ongoing process for me. When I’m done with that part, then I’m going through all my email inbox files to delete old items. Get rid of things with attachments that are stored elsewhere.
If you’re a real estate agent, I highly recommend keeping chains of email. Years ago I had a client who filed with the Attorney Generals office of Indiana to get my license removed because she didn’t get a survey and stated that I told her NOT to get one. In fact, I told her the opposite, and I had email AND voicemails to prove otherwise. People do crazy things, so cover your tail and save those files!
Once they’re all in the right email inbox file, you can right click and it gives you an option to create a file for those emails. Store it in the closed file for that property. After you’ve opened the new file to verify the emails are there, you can go ahead and delete them out of your actual email, if you feel comfortable doing that. One of my goals for 2019 is to do that with all files we close, right after they’re closed.
But go ahead, take some time and clean out your email, tidy up the inbox folders, unsubscribe to junk mail, etc.
Step 3. Clear your Downloads
Now you need to find your downloads file on your computer and delete as many of those files as possible. If they are files you actually need, pull them out of the downloads and into the appropriate file. My downloads file goes back 3 years! Lots of stuff in there to get rid of!
Step 4. Your desktop organization
Now you need to organize any files that are cluttering up your desktop. Mine was completely full at one point a few years ago, and I vowed then to never get it that full ever again. Plus, files on your desktop take up more room and slow down your hard drive worse than files that are in a documents type folder on your hard drive.
Step 5. If you have a documents folder, clean up that.
Do the same process as the above step 4, but now with your documents files.
Step 6. iPhoto
Dun dun dun… cue the menacing music. Probably the task people dread the most. Getting rid of old photos. A few years ago, we started putting all our iPhotos into an app called Chatbooks. It creates a photo book of your phone pics and sends it to you to keep forever. We have a book per year starting in 2014 and we absolutely love them! They come in softcover or hardcover and have something to fit every style or taste. They even have automatic books that you can have set-up. If you only take a few photos, this might be a great option. You set your preferences and once you have X number of pics, chapbooks automatically sends you a book. I opted to create mine manually because I take so many photos that I don’t really need in a book, so I needed more control. But I keep the app on my phone and just go into it once a month during the year and pull in the photos from that month, add captions if I want and then at the end of that year, I have it printed. The books can hold 365 pages so you could do a photo a day if you wanted. Once I receive my book, I clear out a lot of the photos from my iPhoto account then, unless they’re really special and I want to keep them. There are tons of different apps for this. Shutterfly will print individual pics for you, if that’s more your speed than a photo book. We just love the ease of use for chatbooks. You can see some of our Chatbook covers above.
Step 7. Run a disc defrag – but only after reading this article. Computers have a built-in program(s) for this and it’s not hard to do. I prefer to run it at night so it doesn’t cut into my work time, although I don’t need to do it anymore because my operating system automatically does this for me now. Click the link HERE to a great article on Mac computers and when/if you should run a defrag or not.
Step 8. Empty Computer Trash
You guys, you did it! You cleared some clutter, organized your email, put your files where they belong, got rid of several selfies and now your computer is ready for whatever you throw at it this year!
Okay – I gotta get back to clearing out that email. Leave me a comment below and let me know if you’re going to try any (or all?!) of these steps this week. Or if you have some other digital clean-up routine, I’d love to hear about it!