In 2013, my series on 13 money resolutions was a big hit. After getting my finances in order, I decided to focus on decluttering my online life in February. To be honest, it’s a mess.
My computer, my inbox, and my social media accounts—all of them are out of control. It feels like a garden overtaken by weeds, and I want to trim it down to a neat, organized space.
February is perfect for this task—it has four weeks and starts on a weekend, giving me time to kick off and then report back every Friday. I invite you to join this challenge and together we can support each other and track our progress every week.
Here’s my plan to tackle one project each week:
**Week 1: Organize My Computer**
I mostly use my laptop, so I will:
1. Back up all my data using a portable hard drive. This includes My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and more.
2. Organize everything into neatly labeled folders instead of cluttering my desktop. I’ll have a folder for archives, a folder for favorites like my net worth file, and another for current projects. Everything else will go onto the hard drive.
3. Uninstall programs I no longer use.
4. Run a full virus scan to clean up my three-year-old laptop, so it runs more smoothly until I can buy a new one.
**Week 2: Social Accounts**
I use Facebook personally and will:
– Go through my friend list, organize them into groups, and remove people I haven’t interacted with in years. I’ll maintain a small group for regular updates and a larger group for occasional browsing.
– Revamp my blog’s Facebook page with new photos and add interesting blogs that I’ve been meaning to follow. This will bring added value to my blog.
– On Twitter, I’ll follow more people in the personal finance niche and update my list of bloggers to include new ones I haven’t yet added.
– Set up Hootsuite to manage all my social accounts from one place. It’s an excellent tool if you haven’t tried it.
**Project Inbox Zero**
I started this in January but didn’t get far. My goal is to have zero emails in my inbox. I’ll archive old emails into folders for family, friends, blog, work, and admin (separate folders for the UK, France, and Guatemala).
I’ll unsubscribe from all those newsletters and alerts I never read, from real estate notifications to company newsletters I accidentally signed up for years ago.
Eric at Narrow Bridge has a program called Zero Inbox Week that I’ll use to streamline this process. Another great tool is Swizzle; it lets you unsubscribe from unwanted emails and compiles the ones you want to keep into a single digest email.
**Blog Organization**
Thanks to Sicorra’s blog planner, I’ll manage my blog more efficiently. I’ll write 15 non-time-sensitive posts to use as a buffer when I’m busy or uninspired. Additionally, I’ll ensure I have two weeks’ worth of posts scheduled in advance, with the exception of my Friday recaps.
So ideally, I should only need to write one recap post each week for five weeks straight and still have three posts left if I post five times a week.
I’ll reorganize my Google Reader into groups to easily access blogs I read daily and separate the ones I read occasionally into a different folder.
I will also:
– Add SEO descriptions, tags, links to recent articles, and featured images to my older posts that lack these elements.
– Update every Friday on my progress to hold myself accountable.
How is your digital life going? Want to join the challenge?