Spring cleaning your digital life: why bother?

At this time of year there’s always an avalanche of articles about the benefits of a good spring clean. This advice used to be focused on cleaning and decluttering our homes after winter’s hibernation, but experts now suggest that a seasonal spruce up in other areas of our lives can be similarly therapeutic.

That’s certainly true when it comes to our digital lives. At Zen, we’re all too aware that our virtual existences can easily become messy, disorganised and difficult to navigate - just like real life.

Creating order from this chaos can be beneficial in all sorts of ways. Here are our top three:

Productivity

Order is the foundation of getting stuff done. If your home screen is a mess of files, folders and documents, or your phone is bunged up with unused apps, the things you really need are harder to find and, with all that peripheral clutter, more difficult to focus on. Here’s how a spring clean can boost productivity:

1. Delete apps you no longer use. will make devices easier to navigate and potentially more secure. It might even enhance performance.
2. Organise your emails. Use labels and folders to organise messages and either delete or archive old emails. Tidying your inbox will make the important messages you really do need to keep easier to find.
3. Organise your cloud. So much of our digital detritus is housed in the cloud these days, so ditch duplicates and consolidate files. Again, use folders to create a logical order.
4. Do not disturb. Use those ‘do not disturb’ or ‘focus’ settings on your devices and stop being driven to distraction by beeps, pings and chimes. Focused work is impossible against an ongoing chorus of alerts and notifications.

Wellbeing

A digital spring clean won’t just make you more productive, it could also make you healthier and happier. Digital distractions are stressful, and so are fears around security, passwords and digital privacy. Meanwhile, online content can be both addictive and anxiety-inducing. It’s time for a change.

1. Update your antivirus. Hopefully, this happens automatically, but do check to make sure. Run a virus scan and make sure this is set to regularly repeat. Oh, and set all important software and apps to automatically update, too.
2. Get real. You probably know if you spend too long online. Maybe excessive screen use is making you feel sluggish or down in the dumps, or you may be ignoring other areas of your life. The internet can be excellent, as long as it's not overwhelming. Make sure your life offline is as vigorous, varied and life-enhancing as it should be, even if that means spending less time in virtual worlds.
3. Be anti-social. Well, not really. But do think about being a bit more anti-social media, especially if the experience on Facebook, Insta, X or any of the others is anything other than a positive experience. If that’s true for you, it might be time to unfollow some of the online ‘friends’ that are filling your feed with negativity. Oh, and think about limiting the time you spend doom scrolling, too.
4. Subscribe to unsubscribing. Do you need all those 10% off emails, or are they a distraction? Maybe one or two streaming services are enough, rather than four or five? Save money and stop clutter by having a thorough audit of the online services you subscribe to and getting rid of any you don’t really want or need.

Security and privacy

We’ve mentioned already that security and privacy are causes of online anxiety, so another way to boost your online experience, and reduce your stress levels at the same time, is to bolster your cyber defences. The sheer ubiquity of online scams and stolen IDs makes security and privacy a must for any digital spring clean.

1. Get password savvy. Your passwords are your first line of defence against cybercrime, so make sure each one is strong and unique and enable two factor authentication where possible.
2. Go private. It’s tempting to give apps and platforms access to everything, just to make the setup process easier, but that can mean losing control of what you share online. Go through the privacy setting of your most-used software and limit permissions to what an app really needs to function properly.
3. Remind yourself of the cybersecurity rules. The basics matter. Your bank won’t ring you up and ask for your password. Never click a link in an unsolicited email or text. If you’re unsure if a caller is from the company they claim to represent, politely leave the call and then phone the company on a publicly available number. It’s worth reminding yourself of these foundations of cyber safety from time to time, so they’re always front and centre.
4. Back up the important stuff. It might be work documents or holiday photos, but the important thing is to make sure anything that is precious to you is safely backed up in the cloud or on an external drive. Data loss does happen, so protect yourself from the frustration or heartache of losing important documents or priceless memories, and get peace of mind at the same time.

Once you’ve given your digital life a thorough going over, you should find your online existence a little smoother and a bit less stressful.

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