Today I want to talk about an area of the office that may just be one of my favourite things to organise – your computer!
Because we can’t SEE computer clutter as obviously as we can see physical clutter, we often don’t realise it’s there but believe me, it’s still affecting you.
How does it affect you?
When you open your Inbox and feel drained at the sight of all your emails, when your computer runs slow because there are so many photos on there and when you click into your Google Reader and can’t BELIEVE how much some people post because you went through your blogs for 3 hours yesterday and now there are 127 unread items yet again!
Sound familiar?
Let’s look at 4 places where you can declutter electronically:
Free downloads
We (especially women) like fr.ee things, don’t we? Buy one, get one free sales come to mind… As a result, we download anything and everything we can find that’s for fr.ee.
If it’s fr.ee, it’s got to be good, right?
No, actually, it’s not all good. Not only are you cluttering up your computer but you can’t possibly use all the things that are out there because we live in an information-overload society.
I wish I could say that I”m immune to the addiction to FREE stuff but I’m not!
At one point I had about 6 different grocery shopping lists on my computer (all fr.ee downloads) and 10 different versions of a to-do list. None of them quite worked for me so I made my own.
Mmmm, email. My clients need help with email more than any other thing in their office, and paper’s a close second. That’s because email’s so fast and because we don’t use it correctly.
Did you know that for every email you send out, you get at least two emails back?
Get familiar with the delete key (my favourite key on the keyboard) and start deleting. Delete immediately once you’ve replied to an email and don’t file unless you absolutely have to.
Disable all the notifications from social networking sites like Facebook. I only get friend requests, messages and notes on my wall in my inbox. The rest I’ll see when I get a chance to log on.
Here again, decide on your comfort level for emails and make sure you work your system until you can breathe again.
Personally, I set a daily goal of deleting at least 50 items so once I’m done with my inbox, I go through my Sent Items and delete, delete, delete 😉
It’s this weird game I play – anybody have some other weird email games?
As a matter of interest, how many emails are in your inbox right now?
Look out next week for part 2 of decluttering your computer

