How to honor National Clean Out Your Computer Day

National Clean Out Your Computer Day, which occurs on the second Monday in February, invites you to take time out of your day to do a bit of basic housekeeping on your computer. Of course, I am sure we can all agree that this ought to happen more often that once per year, but hey, once a year is better than never!

Important: I recommend making a backup before doing a thorough purging, just to be on the safe side!

Below are 3 ways to clean out your computer:

Computer Desktop

I actually do this daily, but if you have collected lots of miscellaneous things on your computer desktop, this is a great day to drag them into folders or delete files and folders that are no longer relevant. 

Email: 

A - Delete anything older than a year (or whatever time frame feels right for you.)

B - Unsubscribe from anything that you are not getting around to reading, no matter how compelling it seems.  

C- Consider whether there are any folder or tagging systems you might put in place to make the emails you do wish to refer to easier to find and take action on.

Documents

A- Look for duplicates of old drafts of finished products and delete them

B - Make sure that the documents that you have chosen to keep are organized logically for you. 

C - Reflect on whether you would benefit from creating consistent file naming protocols to make documents easier to find and delete after they are no longer needed. I like to use a date in the filename so it is easy to tell which versions are the newest. 

For example, the filename “21_02_12 InnerArtOfDeclutteringPromo” lets me know exactly when this file was last updated as well as what the file contains.