(3_5) How To DETOX_ Digital Declutter 💻🍒Organization Tips!

Before I begin, I want to give a huge thanks to Squarespace for being today's sponsor. I will be talking about them more towards the end of the video. Welcome to the third part in my How to Detox series. So far, we've covered how to clean up our physical environment and our belongings and our bodies. It is finally time. It is the day where you do not click on Remind Me Tomorrow and you do it. You do it today. For me, detoxing my digital space meant that I was going to go through my phone, my iPad, laptop, hard drives, memory cards, thumb drives, and my Mac computer. I'm actually going to start off with my laptop slash phone. I kind of did them at the same time because most of everything that I work on digitally is on my laptop. So step one was to kind of see the different categories of storage space that I needed to organize. I don't know how it works for PCs, but if you go click on the Apple and then you click on About This Mac and Manage Storage, you can then see on the left side how much space each category is taking up on your computer. That was a good way in the beginning to kind of see the overall picture of everything that my laptop was storing and in what category I needed to work the most on. I'm the type of person, if I start researching into something really seriously, I'll have like 10,000 tabs open. And then I'll kind of stop midway and leave those tabs open for weeks sometimes. Close all the windows, bookmark them beforehand if you need to, and then quit out of all your apps. And then I started off on my desktop. My goal is to always have my desktop fairly clean by the end of the day. So the way that I approached detoxing my digital space was I not only had to think about how to sort through everything, but also how I could prevent future clutter from happening again. And for my desktop, the most important thing was to make folders for the most common categories. Because everyone's lifestyles and jobs are different, we all have different types of clutter. As I was sorting through everything on my desktop, I began to notice patterns of what my clutter was made up of. So what I noticed was reoccurring clutter for me was a lot of screenshots on my desktop. Whether it was for editing videos or inspiration, a lot of them went into those two categories. So I created two folders on my desktop, one for inspo and one for work. And in my work folder, I also have a YouTube folder and a folder for my business. And then I kept and discarded not so much what sparked joy, I guess, but what I needed and what I no longer needed. Some of you guys made the comment in my Kammar method video that you keep clothes not because they spark joy necessarily, but because practically you need a coat to keep you warm. So yeah, it's also important to think practically like if you need something or not. So for music, I no longer buy music or download music. I have a Spotify premium account. I'll leave my Spotify account down below if you're interested in the music that I listen to. Most of the music files that I have are obviously for my videos. And most of the time, they end up in my downloads folder. So that's where I organize everything next. So I finally, once and for all, categorize the different music that I downloaded for YouTube videos into separate categories. So I had like vlog music, dramatic music, cheesy music. So that whenever I'm searching for a song for a video, I could quickly turn to like a specific sound effect that I want to use instead of having it all scattered in a random folder. I also went through my applications folder and deleted any apps that I just didn't need anymore. I would also recommend to look at your own doc and see if you actually use all those applications and if you need them on your doc. As far as notes and documents go, because I want to prevent future declutter from happening, I decided that I really need to organize my note-taking processes better because they are scattered all over the place. I have notes that I randomly write on like napkins. I jot down notes on my stickies, on random pages documents, on notes on my phone. I spent a good while just sorting through a lot of my notes, deleting stuff I no longer cared about or needed. And now moving forward, I just want to have a more purposeful approach to note-taking. So I have specific places for those purposes now. I just want to make sure that I don't have a lot of notes just scattered everywhere and then I don't even end up checking any of them. The next category is photos. Photos and videos. I feel like you might even want to approach this last if we're comparing it to the KonMari method because photos and videos are very sentimental, of course. I just had a ton of photos and also my job being a YouTuber, just a ton of video. The main places that I had photos was on my phone and on Photobooth. Because I had just so many random photos on my phone, what I did last year was I just transferred all the photos from my phone onto my laptop. I dumped everything into a folder called 2017, dumped into a hard drive, and just forgot about it because I didn't want to deal with it. And similar to this year, I transferred everything from my phone onto my laptop, dumped into a folder called 2018, and dumped it onto my hard drive. I actually took the extra effort and I divided it into the 12 months. I have a folder for what happened in January all the way through December. And that at least helped to break it down. I think what I learned from that whole process of trying to declutter my photos and my videos, this is gonna be controversial, I don't know. But I always used to have it a goal to take more photos, just take as many photos as I can because I want to capture memories, which isn't a bad thing. Because I hate when I end up with like 10 of the same photo just like in slightly different angles and like slightly different facial expressions. It's like I don't know what I'm gonna even do with that. And then when I end up with like a gazillion photos, I don't even want to look back at them because it's just too overwhelming. A goal of mine for this year is to just kind of take as little digital photos as I can and go the more old-fashioned route and take photos of my actual cameras. Like I have two Polaroid cameras and now a film camera. And I love having physical Polaroids to hold on to. And for me, at least it just makes the memory more special. And I always look back at them and I hang them up so that I can actually see them. And also for my film camera, I want to play more with that. I went on a huge ramble about taking photos that I decided that I might even just make a separate video about that. The very last place that I sorted through was my Google Chrome. I went on my bookmark manager and I first went through a lot of random websites that I bookmarked. It was really fun to look through a lot of the old websites that I bookmarked because there were a lot of fun DIY projects that I was interested in at the time. And I got re-interested in them. I basically, once again, I organized everything into two categories which are similar to my two folders on my desktop which is business, which is work-related, and also like inspiration and different brands and websites that I like shopping from. So those are the main two folders that my bookmarks landed in. The other main go-to websites on my Google Chrome were Trello. I do want to make a separate video on what is on my Trello and how I use Trello to plan and organize my day-to-day life. I don't really use social media actually ever on my laptop. But I bookmark them anyway just in case. Like, I don't use Facebook. Why do I have that bookmarked? But the main two websites that I want to talk about was YouTube and Gmail. On YouTube, I'm afraid to say this because I don't want anyone to leave me. I decided to go through all of my subscriptions and manage my subscriptions meaning I look through everyone that I watch and really had to ask myself do I really want to be subscribing to this person and the content that they upload. If not, I'm going to unsubscribe. And if life finds a way to bring them back to me, then it will. But yeah, again, I'm afraid to say that because I don't want anyone leaving me. I promise I have awesome content coming. Similar thing for all other social media accounts. Go through the people that you follow and really ask yourself if they spark joy or if their content is life-giving or entertaining to you or if you find yourself feeling emotionally negative. And if you don't want to be rude about it, if they're your friends or whatever, then just mute them so that you don't see their content. And the last place to organize my digital space was my many, many email accounts. I have like five different active emails and my goal is to eventually narrow that down to two emails, one for work and one for spam and shopping basically. I am still working on that. I would love to deactivate a few of my emails. I just no longer need. As far as my main email goes, I was able to bring my inbox down to zero and I star the most important emails that I need to reply to. My friend Eileen from Lavendaire also made a video on how to declutter her digital space and she mentioned this website called unroll.me and you just sign up and enter your email and then you can very quickly unsubscribe to a ton of email that you're just not interested in. I personally don't like being subscribed to anything so there's no items in my roll-up. So, so far I unsubscribed to almost 96 different websites that I didn't even know that I was subscribed to. Sometimes they just like automatically send you emails when you purchase something from their site. Now whenever I get a promotional email, I make sure to kind of unsubscribe to them like on the spot. I think that's really what cleaning is. It's not a one-time detox thing. It's you keep it up afterwards by constantly just doing little things every single day to keep it clean. So I don't know what crazy number it is but I was able to delete so many emails. You could click on the categories tag and you'll see that your mail is divided into social, updates, forums, promotions and I went ahead and I clicked on every single category and pray that I wasn't deleting anything important, too important and I trashed it. I trashed it and then I emptied my trash. Yup. I never ever did this before. I never detoxed through my email. So this was a really satisfying moment to see like hundreds of thousands of emails just like bye-bye. Bye. See you never again. Most of them were just really old promo email for the most part. So I did this similar process of cleaning my desktop, my photos, my Google Chrome, everything on my Mac computer and on my iPad. I don't really use my iPad too much for anything other than Procreate. So there wasn't much I have to do there and also on my Mac computer. So again, for me, it was mostly my laptop and also my phone. If you want to see what's on my iPhone video, my apps are pretty much similar to what it was then. But again, I just quickly skimmed through all of my apps and I deleted anything that was unnecessary throughout the year. I downloaded some random apps that I was curious about but then never ended up using them. One thing that I still haven't organized through yet actually is my messages. I feel like my storage space is being taken up mostly by my messages now because I have a lot of photos sent back and forth between people. But the main thing I had to do was transfer my photos, voice memos, and my notes from my phone to my laptop and then from my laptop onto my hard drives. I know not everything is completely sorted through. I still have a lot that I just kind of dragged into my hard drive but it's a lot more organized than before which I'm proud of. Then it was time to finally update. This felt really good. Finally updated my system on my phone, on my iPad, on my Mac computer, and on my laptop. And just to switch things up a bit just so I could feel like a renewed person, I went from an all-white theme to an all-black theme and now everything just looks sleek and new. I wasn't used to it at first but it just feels like I got a brand new computer. Oh, also make sure to give like your actual tech products a good wipe down. My screen is a little bit fingerprint smudged right now. Update your systems, change your desktop wallpaper. This is kind of weird to say but I feel like my MacBook just feels lighter. It lost a little bit of weight. But no really, I went from almost like 20 gigabytes to now about 150 gigabytes. At the same time, I still have so much footage from videos on here from videos I haven't uploaded yet. So that's still quite a bit from what it was previously. And ever since I cleaned up my digital space, I've developed these habits of always keeping my desktop clean because I felt how good it feels to have a clean desktop. And that's the great part about detoxing and making it a big event because when your brain notices this like drastic change and you feel transformed, you want to keep it there and you just make these little changes in habit every day so that you can actually keep it there. I feel like with decluttering, you have to do multiple rounds to actually reach the state of like perfection. I feel like I just did my round one of cleanup and I still have to do like another few rounds of going through every little thing. But I'm pretty content with how clean everything is right now. I really hope this video helped you out or motivated you to start cleaning up your digital space. It really does help improve focus when you're trying to work off your computer or your phone to not be so distracted by the clutter. Once again, huge thanks to Squarespace for being today's video sponsor. I'm going to be talking about them real briefly. If you haven't heard of Squarespace before, they provide a beautiful online platform in which you could create your own website. They have tons of award-winning designer templates to choose from and it's incredibly easy to navigate so you could focus more on the actual content of the website instead of like the design elements of it. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform so there's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. I've used Squarespace before to create a few of my own websites and it's just incredibly easy to navigate. In case you have any more questions or need help with anything, they have 24-7 customer support. It's very flexible as well so you could use it with a variety of types of websites. If you want to start your own e-commerce brand or just have your own blog, a website is just such a great way to express yourself and have this own world that's all your own compared to a social media platform that's already been created. If you want to give it a try on building your own website, go to squarespace.com.com to get a free trial and 10% off your first purchase. I really hope that some of you give it a try. If you do, link your website down below. I hope this series is really motivating you and challenging you to, you know, sort through a lot of shiz that you're too lazy to do before. Honestly, that's the whole aim of the series. Stop being so lazy. Let's do this and let's do it together. squarespace.com.com go give it a try. Building your own website seems crazy, but it's crazy simple. Alright, the sun is setting. That's also the time where my mind starts shutting. So, I love you guys. I'll see you guys soon. Don't forget that I love you a lot. Like, a lot. Alright, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go, go, go.