How to zap digital clutter instead of scrolling on your phone
Less addictive, more useful.
Here at Your House Machine, we talk decluttering of all sorts: the obvious around the house decluttering, but also psychic decluttering, financial simplification, and today we will talk digital decluttering.
Some of my favorite ways to digitally declutter are to prune your phone’s photo collection and organize your financial documents. Today I am sharing a few other ideas for further digital decluttering. It’s so easy for clutter to build up in your digital life, and clearing it out has similar benefits as clearing out house clutter.
1. Clean up your contact list
A month ago, I had — I kid you not — over 3,000 contacts in my phone. What anarchy!
I somehow have never lost my contacts since college…they just grow and grow as I move to new phones. At one point, a bizarre Gmail setting created a contact for every single email I sent, ballooning my contacts beyond any hope of management.
Beyond any hope, that is, until last week. I was grousing yet again about my unwieldy list, and my husband suggested I just declare contacts bankruptcy and delete them all.
I was so fed up I was ready to do a full purge, but decided to check one last time if there was some way to prune the list other than one-by-one. Lo and behold, the Internet told me how to batch-delete.
It took about 30 minutes and I’m down to 300 contacts. Scrolling down my contacts list now is pure joy! At long last, I know who each and every contact is. I can now easily go through the list and append helpful notes like “Sam - Neighbor” or “Bella - Suzy’s mom” for future pruning as life evolves.
2. Get on top of your password management
In this day and age, no one should be remembering their passwords. We should be using unique, secure passwords that are impossible to remember and which change frequently. This requires a password manager tool like 1Password.
If you have any anxiety about getting hacked (and honestly, we all should have this anxiety), take some time this weekend to get your password situation sorted.
In my case, the issue was too many password managers, with some saved in 1Password and others saved in the native Apple Keychain/Password app. And lots of duplicate entries.
This is going to be a satisfying project to clean up, similar to my contact list. I like to do things like this during times when I’d otherwise be scrolling on my phone. It gives me a little dopamine but unlike scrolling, I actually improve my life when I do it.
3. Clean up your financial accounts
This is a small add-on to my existing financial minimalism series, but a tune-up is always a good idea. A friend mentioned recently she combed through her finances to streamline things, and it felt like decluttering to her.
Some tasks to consider as part of a regular financial declutter:
Make sure you’re parking your cash in as high an interest rate account as possible. If you’re not earning any interest, you’re effectively losing money (hello, inflation). I’m a fan of Wealthfront and find its saving account interest rates hard to beat (that’s an affiliate link that adds a boost to your initial rate).
Check the fees on any investment accounts, reducing close to 0 wherever possible (here’s more about investing and the insidiousness of fees)
Rebalance accounts where needed
Reduce the number of accounts you manage. The more dubious side of the financial industry would have you believe complexity is essential; it’s not. It’s actually likely making things much harder. You should be able to easily wrap your head around where your money is and the strategy behind it.
If you have a hard time understanding where your money goes each month, a budget app like Monarch is a great way to track things. I check in on Monarch and make sure expenses are properly categorized whenever I feel an urge to scroll on my phone.
Back on the news sobriety wagon
I shared in my last newsletter that after 8 years of news sobriety, during which I did not regularly consume direct news sources, I fell off the wagon this fall and started reading the news. It was horrible…and despite me offering up my mind and soul to the news cycle, my consumption of news did not change anything for the better!
I’m happy to report I’m back to abstention and feeling a million times better. (And yes, I’m just as informed of the important things as I was when it was letting them ruin my life.)
I believe as strongly as ever that humans are not built to process every human tragedy happening anywhere in the world at all times. We need to find ways to insulate ourselves and focus on our immediate present, or else our mental health and ability to participate in real life suffers.
With the algorithms and now AI getting so effective at commanding attention and telling stories that may or may not be related to reality (those AI videos are scarily good), I think we just need to be off the Internet.
I’ve slimmed down my online presence and am treating this newsletter as a simple email newsletter—which in fairness, has always been its core. While online communities were expansive and affirming in the early days of the Internet, I perceive the balance has shifted. Now, the bad outweighs the good. So I’m working to be offline much more than online, and focus on the real world as much as I can. But don't worry, my drive to organize and share my love of organizing isn’t going anywhere.
