Life Organization
Stuff
Digital Clutter
Digital Clutter
Review, purge, declutter and organize your stuff so that it serves you and not burdens you.
PAST CHALLENGE
(details below)
- October Love on Your Jewelry Every Day
Digital Clutter
Digital Clutter
Digital Clutter
Review your apps, photos, files and content to eliminate what is not needed and organize what is needed.
CURRENT CHALLENGE
November & December 2020
Mobile Apps Purge and Organization
PAST CHALLENGES
(details below)
- October 2020 Digital File Challenge
- Phone Photo Challenge
Schedule
Digital Clutter
Schedule
Review schedule and how you are really spending your time and create plans to focus on what is really important.
Office
Office
Schedule
Get your office to an efficient, clutter-free, organized state to support your household and professional goals.
Home
Office
Home
Through decluttering, purging and organization; create a home that brings peace.
mobile apps Purge and Organize challenge - Winter 2020
Launch - Apps Purge & Organization - November December 2020
For the rest of November and all of December, we will look at purging and organizing the apps on your smartphone and tablets.
Why a Month and a Half?
You might be wondering, why a month and a half for this digital clutter project? Um, HELLO!!! It’s the winter holiday season. You will be busy.
Week of 11/15 and 11/22 – Move Unused Apps to “Holding Area” – phone and tablet(s)
Part 1 - Create Holding Area for the Unused Apps.
The easiest way to do this is to create a separate page for those apps to sit so they are not in your immediate view.
Part 2 - Move Unused Apps to the Holding Area
Drag and drop the apps to the holding area.
No need to delete apps. However, if there is an app that you know, for sure, that you haven't used in a while please feel free to delete the app.
Week of 11/29 – Create Groupings on Phone & Tablet(s)
This week we look at groupings for your apps.
This week, you are only going to write down/note what possible categories make up your apps.
Some ideas are below. Try them out and see if they work for you.
- Every Day
- Finance
- Travel
- Utilities
- In Touch
- Shopping
- Food
- Games
- Entertainment
- Photos Videos
- Fitness Wellness
- By Color - check out the rainbow grouping of mobile apps by The Home Edit. (#8 of their 14-day mini-edit post)
The important part here is to select/create the groupings/categories make sense for YOU.
The next two weeks, we will moving apps together into your selected/created groups/categories.
Week of 12/6 & 12/13 – Moving Apps to Groups on Phone & Tablet(s)
Now, it is time to move apps to their respective groups.
Take your time doing this and adjust as needed.
Week of 12/20 – Delete “Holding Area” Apps
(Posted 1/2/21)
Take the time to delete the apps that are in the holding area that you have not used in December.
Week of 12/27 – Plan to Maintain Apps
(Posted 1/2/21)
Schedule appointments with yourself to review your apps once a quarter (3/31, 6/30, 9/30, 12/31)
Digital File Challenge Week 3 – Move and Purge
Move Files Off of Devices and Into the Cloud
This is where we now will actually start moving and purging digital files and documents.
Here are two quick things you can take on this week to get things started:
- Recommendation #1 – move files off of your devices and into your cloud storage location of preference (devices = laptops, tabletop computers and tablets), this will allow you to gain access to files on-demand
- Recommendation #2 – move files off of your thumb drives (I have 8) into your cloud storage location of preference
Later this week, I’ll share more recommended tasks to keep the momentum going.
Don’t stress, we have two full weeks and next week we will look at external hard drive storage options and strategies.
OCTOBER 2020 Analog challenge
Daily Love Your Jewelery Challenge
Every day, select a piece or pieces of jewelry and wear it for a full day.
Pay attention to how you feel when you see it throughout the day.
- If you feel good or happy or in love, then place it back into your jewelry box along with a piece of paper so you know you’ve spent a day with it and you want to keep it.
- If you aren’t feeling it, then place it in a “holding space” until the end of the month.
At the end of the month, we will look at options for the “not feeling it“ pieces.
Digital File Challenge Week 2 - select file locations & stor
Review Your Inventory
How did last week go? Surprised at how many locations in which you have files stored?
I know I was. My final tally was this:
- 7 cloud
- 4 hardware (laptop, tablet, etc)
- 8 thumb drives
Select What Will Work for You
Based on what you discovered last week, what locations made sense? Consider keeping those.
What locations didn't make sense? Consider moving files off of them to the locations that work.
Consider what files you'll need "at a moment's notice" vs files that just need to be stored away.
Don't Move a Thing
Yep, you guessed it, you are still not moving any files in your storage locations.
We are still in a planning phase so that when we hit week 3, we can be smart about moving our digital files.
Best Practices - back-up and storage
As you are decided what will work for you in the future for storage, don't forget about backing everything up.
You want your files in a cloud space and a "hard" space such as an external hard drive in the event of a natural disaster or hardware failure or a virus (especially ransomeware).
Consider these best practices from How-to Geek Article: What's the Best Way to BackUp My Computer?
- Back-up to an external hard drive
- Back-up over the internet
- Use a cloud storage service
week 1 digital file challenge
Assess What You Have and Where
- This week, you will be looking at what files you have where those files live.
Create a spreadsheet or document list or paper list of the locations and general categories.
As you inventory, keep these things in mind:
· Include thumb-drives and external drives in the inventory
· Don’t forget the cloud drives: Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Amazon, iCloud and more
· Note the Cost: Be sure to note the cost for any cloud service you are paying for
· Let go of Emotions: You might feel shame or bewilderment at the volume of digital files. Let that go.
Don’t worry about deleting or moving files. We will look at that next week.
The only action you have is to document a high-level inventory.
Have questions? Feel free to post questions in comments or reach out via DM on social media with questions about this week’s work.
October 2020 Digitgal Challenge
Weekly Digital File Challenge
Recently, Google announced that items in your Google Drive trash folder will only stay there for 30 days. This is a change from files staying in your trash folder indefinitely.
Now, I don’t use my trash folder for “storage.” However, this got me thinking about all the different places where I have files. And, there are quite a few.
This inspired the October challenge. The challenge will be weekly in cadence. Each Sunday, I will introduce a task to work on for the entire week. More details and suggestions on what to do will be shared through out each week.
Below is the weekly schedule for the month of October. More details will be added each Sunday.
Week 1 – Assess What You Have and Where
Week 2 – Select Locations for File Storage
Week 3 – Move and Purge
Week 4 – Continue Work and Maintenance Plan
Delivery of Services
Virtual Coaching
Work with Jax on Zoom, FaceTime or Teams to assess your project, develop a plan, execute on that plan to closure.
ON HOLD - Full-Service On-Site Collaboration
Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, on-site services are on hold.
Jax will come to your home/office to develop and execute on a plan to declutter, organize, streamline and more.
Digital Clutter - September 2020 - Phone Photo Challenge
Overview
Assess, purge and organize photos on your phone.
How?
Delete photos
Create decade albums
Organize photos
Plan for future maintenance
Daily Tasks - September 1 - 15
Here is a list of what we will be doing each day, starting September 1. These tasks will be posted to Instagram (@jaxtasticlife) each day.
- September 1 - Assess - How many photos do you have on your phone?
- September 2 - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 3 - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 4 - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- Septermber 5 - DAMPAP - “delete as many photos as possible” in 5 minutes
- September 6 - Delete 30 min - spend a leisurely 30 minutes deleting photos off of your phone
- September 7 - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 8 - Check-In - Reflect on how this is going? Good? Bad? Meh?
- September 9 - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 10 - Create - create decade albums
- September 11 - Delete Oldest - go to the oldest photos on your phone and delete 30 photos
- September 12 - Delete Farthest Location - go to the farthest location on your photo map and delete 30 photos
- September 13 - Delete - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 14 - Delete - Delete - delete 30 photos off of your phone
- September 15 - Move - move 30 photos to your decade folders
- September 16 - DAMPAP – 10 Minutes
- September 17 – Delete a Multiple of 30 Photos (30, 60, 90, etc)
- September 18 – DD – Delete Duplicates
- September 19 – 30 Minutes Leisurely Deletion
- September 20 – DAMPAP – 15 minutes
- September 21 – Like with Like
- September 22 - Draft Maintenance Plan
- September 23 – DAMPAP – 15 minutes
- September 24 – DD - Delete Duplicates
- September 25 – Move 30 Photos to Decade Albums
- September 26 - DAMPAP – 15 minutes
- September 27 – Delete 30 Photos
- September 28 – Delete a Multiple of 30 Photos (30, 60, 90, etc)
- September 29 - Move 30 photos to decade albums
- September 30 – Schedule maintenance tasks
- October 1 - Debrief Day – What Worked? What didn’t Work? Go Forward Plan