Decluttering our spaces, whether in the physical or electronic, can do wonders for our mental health. But like most things that are good for us, we can often put it off to another day when we ‘have time to do it’. And that time is always elusive…
Firstly, having a plan on how to get started is useful to get the ball rolling.
1 – Review
- Have a look at areas of your digital environment that might need tidying up: your laptop’s desktop; the hard drive or Cloud where you store documents; taskbar; mobile.
2 – Remove
- Decide on categories of items to be kept and bin the rest that have outgrown their purpose.
3 – Organise
- Decide on a folder structure and name these in a simple, obvious way.
4 – Monitor
- Set time aside on a regular basis to tidy up folders and remove anything that is no longer needed. This could be weekly or monthly – whatever works for you.
Folders
Having folders organised in a way that makes sense to you is important to sorting out your documents. Try not to have too many main folders – otherwise you could end up getting in a mess again. Make these relevant to you so that you can easily find important documents and files that help you in your work.
Urgency and Importance
It may be useful to have four main types of folders that fit in the Eisenhower Matrix of Urgency and Important:
- Urgent and Important
- Urgent and Not Important
- Not Urgent and Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
This will help to easily find documents that are needed for tasks that need to be done at once or can wait a while.
Files
Keep the names of files relevant to the document so they can be easily found. Try not to have long labels for files for simplicity.
In your scheduled declutter you can always review file names and check if they are still in the most relevant folder – and if they’re not needed any more, bin them.
It may feel a pain to start sorting out all the digital documents that have run away with themselves but finding a bit of time every month to tidy things up will help your business run smoother and give you a welcome sense of clarity.