The Art of Declutter
January 09, 2017
by AditiBhave,KOSBE Administrative and Project Coordinator
Live Life, Clutter Free!
Who wants an inbox that says 8768 unread emails??? Not me!
Does your inbox have thousands of unread emails? Is every company on earth sending you promotional emails?
Have you got tons of digital photos and are unable to find the good ones when you need them?
Well then, I guess you already know that you are staring at Digital Clutter right in the face. And boy, does it suffocate!
Just the simple act of trying to find the correct file or folder from a desktop screen, full of icons, gets us irritated and unsettled. To add to it, thousands on unread emails, social, promotional or otherwise, make us feel bogged down and we live in the constant fear of losing an important email.
So how do you deal with this overload of data? How do you keep your data organized in a way that you can pull up whatever you want in less than a minute? How do you ensure that all your pictures and precious memories don’t get lost? How do you have a clean inbox, and most importantly, save yourself from the pain of data overload?
The art of Data Declutter is challenging enough for an individual, imagine, what a business will go through if employees keep storing data in a random manner. Duplication of data, waste of time and resources, employee dependent information access are some of the issues that immediately come to our mind. How then, will a small business, with limited resources, deal with Data Clutter before it comes back to bite them?
To answer this, and to help individuals, small entrepreneurs, office managers and administrative assistants manage their digital life effectively, KOSBE together with Shipshape Solutions organized a seminar on Digital Decluttering – Organizing Your Documents, Files, and Photos. Angie Hyche, Professional Organizer and Owner of Shipshape Solutions, spoke at length about the benefits and principles of organizing, which according to her are same for any type of organizing activity, physical, paper, digital etc.
According to Angie, “Timely Digital Decluttering can help you protect your data from system failure and virus attacks, manage passwords better and easily locate and address important emails."
She also said,"The basic principles of organization are essentially the same: Reduce. Arrange. Maintain."
It was fun to learn about how one could effectively manage their passwords, emails, documents and photos. We learned different ways by which we could unsubscribe the unwanted emails, protect their passwords using password manager software, make effective use of bookmarks and notes, and how to protect and preserve precious memories stored in the form of digital photos.
Some of the cool apps and tricks that we got to know were:
- 1Password and Dashlane for password management
- Unroll.me to manage the relentless flow of emails
- Folder system to manage and categorize your emails
- Syncing your files to the Cloud
- Evernote, Onenote, GoogleKeep for note taking
- Trello, Basecamp, Salesforce for project management
The group agreed that the session was very informative and everyone was ready to get back and start their digital declutter journey! And wouldn't you agree,decluttering is the best way to start the new year :)
