112: Cleaning Digital Dust

I don't know about you, but the beginning of a year has me really wanting to clean out. I will often kind of purge my home and do deep cleaning and get into all of those drawers and cupboards in our closet and just kind of get rid of the things that are not bringing us joy, are not serving us anymore, and it's just time to let go of it. Does that happen to you? Sometimes it happens in the spring, sometimes it happens in the new year. But one thing that I also think is incredibly important that we don't talk enough about is digital clutter. Digital clutter that is muddying up our lives, our technology, our minds, and making us waste time. And so I actually think that slowing down to clean up our digital dust is potentially even more important than cleaning our phys dust. So I want to talk about digital Clutter today. I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. Now if you haven't heard this term, digital clutter encompasses all the disorganized and unnecessary and overwhelming elements of our digital lives. So things like cluttered desktops, random files, unorganized documents, apps that we don't use, and emails that we need to get rid of now. Just like physical clutter, digital clutter can significantly affect our productivity and our well being. There's been a couple of studies that have come out recently on the effects of digital clutter. One reported that the Average person wastes 4.3 hours a week searching for files. Another one says employees spend 1.8 hours every day, which is 9.3 hours a week on average, searching and gathering for information which indicates unorganized digital data. And it contributes to wild inefficiency. I don't know about you, but just searching for things in folders, it's something that I do way too often. Now there's other studies that talk about how cluttered spaces lead to increased levels of stress, literally increasing our cortisol, which means undue stress, unnecessary stress. One study by Harvard Business highlights that email clutter in particular leads to a feeling of being overwhelmed and out of control, thereby affecting our stress levels as well. And this one I thought was important. A study from the University of Minnesota said that while some levels of disorganization can sometimes spur creativity, excessive clutter, digital or physical, and hampers free flowing thought and creativity. And so I think it's a worthwhile discussion to have today. And I'm also so excited to tell you that we've created a digital decluttering checklist for you as a free download. So you can head over to professionalcreative.com and in the show notes you can download our Digital Decluttering checklist just to make sure that you're getting all of that digital dust cleaned up. You know, I think that we often put off organizing our digital spaces sometimes because we don't think that it's pressing. But other times I think for me it's because as soon as I get into my digital space, I don't want to waste time tidying it up. I want to just get to work. But the clarity and the efficiency that comes with a well organized digital space saves me so much time. It literally cannot be overstated. It means that our work is more efficient. It's absolutely worth the the necessity of addressing our digital clutter. So a well organized digital space leads to significant improvement in our work efficiency and our peace of mind. It literally reduces stress by eliminating that constant nagging feeling of untidiness and disorganized files and difficulty finding things and where did we save it and that kind of thing. It leads to a clearer mind and better focus. Plus it makes our digital interactions just less time consuming. Right? So here are action steps for your digital decluttering that go along with the free decluttering checklist that we're giving you as a freebie in today's episode. So first of all, organize your files and documents. So I love to create a logical folder structure. I think this looks different for everyone, but this could be based on projects or dates or categories or priorities. We typically keep folders based on the program and then make sure they're super organized on the inside. So, you know, someone coming into your workspace could theoretically find something without having a mind map of your brain archiving old files. So I love to regularly review files and just move them, the ones that we don't need on a daily basis, move them into an archive folder. Sometimes I even move them onto like a external hard drive and just put them somewhere else. And then using like a cloud storage like Dropbox or backups on a hard drive really help in backing up important documents that are really big that you might not want to keep locally, but that will also declutter your local storage. And just make sure that you've got enough data happening on your computer. Picture this, your creative business thriving beyond your wildest dreams. More than just a business, a entire legacy. It's not just possible, but I want you to feel how close it is to within your reach. I want to unfold the map of success together with you. In fact, I want to invite you to join me on a journey unlike any other with my brand new professional creative business coaching program. If you're currently making in between 50 and $200,000 a year in your business, it's time to think bigger. Imagine expanding your team, honing your leadership and overcoming the challenges most businesses face. You know, what got you to where you are today isn't going to be the same thing that gets you to where you're going. If you're nodding along, I made this program for you. We'll have weekly live coaching calls, accountability pods to keep you on track, and a vault of resources and bonuses along with a community of fellow creative big thinkers. Because growing together is where all the magic happens. We've got the time management lab, my 5 million launch debrief, and a creative profits training which you'll have as a launch pad for all your revenue streams. But if you're unsure if this is your next step, I would love to chat with you. So in order to do that, I need you to send me a DM on Instagram or fill out our short interest form over@bonniecristine.com coach so that I can personally follow up with you and just ask you a few questions because I want to make sure that this is the perfect fit for you and your journey right now. You have my word. If I don't think I can truly move the needle for you, I'll tell you. So if you're ready to elevate your creative business and step into your power and into a room of some really big thinkers, join me by filling out the interest form@bonniecristine.com coach or just DM me over on Instagram the word coach and I'll respond with my first few questions for you. Together, let's make your passion your legacy. So I'm gonna work through a couple of the decluttering items that even hearing me talk about them are gonna. They're gonna make you feel so much better. So a good desktop cleanup. Delete unused files and organize the ones that you have to keep. And then clear your recycle bin or your trash bin on your computer, like a good clean wallpaper on your desktop for just a really nice uncluttered look. If that's your thing. It is my thing. And then again, creating that logical folder structure and reorganizing folders, I would say just take a day to get all of your digital spaces decluttered. Moving into a new year, it's the perfect time to do it. You can archive old or infrequently used files into a separate folder or cloud storage or a backup fold and then name files in a consistent way again. The goal should be that someone who isn't in your business could come and theoretically find something that they were looking for. Email management so one of my favorite things to do is just unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters and marketing emails. Sometimes I'll go into a batch of this and so like everything that comes in over the next two weeks from companies that no longer serve me, I will unsubscribe from. So it takes like doing it a little bit every day for a couple of weeks to get the majority of it. But why do we let these emails from companies you ordered something for your mother in law from two years ago pile up in our inboxes and then back to email management. You can set up filters and labels to automatically organize incoming emails. I love doing that. And then archiving old emails. I love to get to Inbox zero as frequently as I can. Take a moment to uninstall or delete apps that you haven't used in the last six months. I would actually I did this recently and I had about 18 apps that I needed to just clear off my phone that I don't use anymore. But they were just hanging out, cluttering up my phone and then turning off unnecessary notifications to minimize distractions. This one is huge, my friends. Every notification that we allow, even a moment of our focus will distract us. And so I am super strict about the notifications that I let come in on my phone. No app is allowed to notify me of anything. It's basically only messages from family photo and media. Yes, we're going there. How many photos do you have on your phone? If you delete old photos that you don't need anymore or just go through and delete the ones that you know you don't want anymore and then even create, create albums. So one thing that I do at the end of every year I've done this for, I think the last seven years is that I take all of our family videos and I turn them into a dvd. Also get it on a USB stick so that we have like home videos, you know, like I had when I was a kid, like on the VHS tape player. Now we have them on a DVD and we can watch all of our family videos from the year. And then I also do a photo book. So all of the pictures from our phones, from me and David's phone, I take and I turn them into a family photo album that is on paper and you have to flip through it and I love it. So I use Artifact Uprising for that and they're gorgeous. Now I also love to do a good old browser cleanup. So checking all of our bookmarks and the things like apps and extensions that we have append to our browser and uninstall any necessary plugins. So important to keep a good browser setup that just works for you. One of my favorite things to do is to create folders with bookmarks in them where I don't have to think about all the different tabs that I need to open for specific things. So for instance, if I'm taking a course, I'll build out a folder in my browser and inside we'll have like the login page, the community, and any resources that I want quick access to. And then I can just right click and open it all at one time. Such a great time saver. And it just lowers the barrier to entry, which I find way more inspiring. Okay, so this is just a taste of the decluttering checklist that we've got for you. You are going to love it. We talk you through how to do a social media cleanup and unfollow or mute accounts that no longer serve you or negatively impact your mood. It is going to be worth your time to go grab this download and just dive into decluttering and getting rid of some of your digital dust as you go into this. So don't forget to go get your digital decluttering checklist over in today's show notes. Again, that's@PropriationalCreative.com my friends. Create the beauty that you want to see come alive in your digital spaces. And remember, there's room for you.