Digital Organizing

Clutter doesn’t just apply to physical items. It can be a “photos” folder full of unsorted pictures or an inbox that is overflowing. For many people, their digital clutter can be just as overwhelming as living in a home with mountains of stuff. Here are a few tips to help you get your digital life in order.

Start Broadly

Begin with broad categories like “Pictures” or “Projects” or “Financial” but try to keep it around 5. Once you have these set you can create sub-folders within the broader categories. To prevent a lot of visual clutter and make things easier to find, keep the sub-folders to a minimum whenever possible. The sub-folders can be things like “Family Vacation 2026” nested in “Pictures” or “2023 Taxes” nested in “Financial”.

Name Wisely

A really key factor for organizing digital files is using a clear, repeatable naming convention. For example, let’s say you’re running a small business. You have dozens and dozens of vendor invoices but there was no clear process for naming these files. Some have the date included while others don’t, some have the vendor’s full name spelled out while others have just the initials. This can make finding anything difficult. In this case establishing all invoices must be named with the date and full name of vendor will help prevent confusion in the future. One pro tip when working with dates, write them in standard numerical order (YYYY-MM-DD) so that they end up being sorted chronologically.

Maintain Routinely

You don’t need to carve out a whole weekend to go through old emails or to clear out your downloads folder. You can dedicate 15 minutes once a week where you can sort, delete, uninstall and organize. Routine maintenance in manageable chunks of time can help keep things easily accessible and prevent future overwhelm.