Grab a coffee and settle in for a little declutter time. Trust me, you’ll appreciate it in the end. Check out these four areas that can make a huge difference right away.

Want to Be More Productive? 4 Ways to Declutter Your Computer

Clean Up Your Desktop

First, a messy desktop looks awful. And, if it looks awful, it will create a feeling of stress or dread when you look at it. Did you know that too many items on your desktop actually takes up some of your computer’s memory?

Here are a couple of articles that explain it further:

After you get all those items off your desktop. Take a few minutes to make it look inspiring. You can find a beautiful stock image in Pixabay or Unsplash and make it your background. If you are feeling really creative, you can design a collage or add your favorite quote to your image in Canva. Just be careful about the file size; larger file size takes more memory.

Have a Backup Plan

What if your hard drive crashed today? Would you lose important files? Trust me. You don’t want to ever feel that kind of panic and stress. Take precautions and you’ll have no worries.

Here are a few choices:

  • At the end of your business day, backup your files to an external hard drive.
  • At the end of your business day, backup your files to cloud storage, like Dropbox or GoogleDrive.
  • Consider adding an automatic backup to your arsenal. Try BackBlaze. It works in the background making sure that it’s backing up all of your data files. I use it and never notice when it’s working.

If you just do one of the options above, you’ll still be way ahead. I do a combination of all three.

Clean Your Contacts

When was the last time you reviewed your Contacts? You might be surprised to find several duplicate contacts. This could happen by syncing a personal list with your business list. Or it can also happen by syncing with social media; like Facebook. You can easily merge the duplicates into one listing. Make sure you delete the ones that you no longer need.

Sift Your Files

Sometimes when I’ve been working on multiple projects, my files get messy. Not only do I have a messy desktop, my folders will be unorganized. Truth? I’ve been known to “clean” my desktop by making a folder and stuffing all the items from my desktop into it, just to make my desktop clean (you know, so I could record a quick video or something). Ha! It happens to everyone, I’m sure.

Every once and a while, when I really can’t stand it anymore, I sit down and really clean things up. I start with the basics and categorize everything into main folders. Then once the big mess is gone, I go under one category and make smaller ones, and sift again.

While you’re at it, look at your file names. Can you easily determine what’s in that file without having to open it? No? Create a file naming system.

Figure out how to make file names work for you. Here’s an example: You have all your blogs in Word documents. Put them in a Blog folder and name them by the date you published them – 2022-0823-Awesome-Title.doc Do you see what I did there? If you use that naming system and your files were sorted in alphabetical order, all your blogs will be listed in the order they were published (Year, Month, Day).

What are you waiting for? Block off some time on your calendar right now and declutter these 4 areas. I bet you’ll feel so much better… and be more productive.