TIME FOR A SPRING CLEAN!

Ruwandi Perera notes that being methodical helps our digital lives

You may be a neat freak who religiously ensures that everything around you is spick and span. Or you might be a messy slob who believes that time is meant to be spent doing better things than worrying about the dust and germs.

Regardless of on which side of the cleanliness debate you stand, it helps to be orderly and organised – especially when there are so many tangibles and intangibles, which make up our regular and digital lives.

We’re living in an era of AI and on the brink of the emergence (if not reign) of inorganic beings that are intelligent enough to control a large part of what makes the world go round. It is this reality that’s pushing us humans to be more digitally organised so as to be in control – because if we lose control now, we might never get it back!

Being digitally organised doesn’t require much effort: you only need consistency. So start small and do some spring cleaning. Begin with your phone; after all, it’s probably the only thing you keep close to you at all times.

Decluttering your smartphone can seem simple and even unimportant but the effects of this undertaking are manifold. You will have better speed, more storage and above all else, a well-structured and organised device.

Your photo gallery will be an excellent place to start the spring clean. Delete all your duplicate images, and check whether you need to automatically download and save all those photos, memes and videos you receive on WhatsApp.

Then move on to your downloads folder. You will probably find numerous files ranging from Excel sheets to PDFs, which you’ll no longer need. Delete them promptly. Continue this activity until your phone has been cleaned of everything that you don’t need, which includes any apps that you’ve downloaded but never used.

Cleaning your emails is much more difficult and might even take several days. It may be practical to keep a reminder to do 15 minutes of email cleaning every week. This sounds painful but you’ll be thankful you did it.

Next comes social media. Review your Facebook account, Instagram page, TikTok account and Linked-In profile. Do you need to update your status? Should you delete memories, photos, videos or posts? And do you need to unfriend people and get off or get onto any platforms?

Try not to keep things for later because cleaning your social media presence will give you peace of mind and refine how you portray yourself to others in cyberspace.

After you clean your smartphone, move onto your laptop.

It might take time to clean your computer but it’ll be worth it. First things first – check whether you have installed all the updates and your computer is up to date. Then go to your folders and begin with the easy ones – for example, your downloads folder. Delete whatever you think is unnecessary because all those files and folders eat up space, slow your machine and don’t add any value to your work.

Don’t forget your browser. Are there bookmarks you’ve pinned from five years ago that you haven’t checked since then and saved tabs that you never open? And are there any pages you have marked as ‘Favourites,’ which you can’t even remember?

Deleting all these unnecessary bits and pieces will undoubtedly enhance your browsing experience.

When it comes to being digitally organised, your online security comes into play as well. Go through your passwords and change them if you haven’t done so in a while. And if you’re the kind of person who uses the same password for everything from your email to your Netflix account, perhaps it is time you stopped providing an easy gateway to hackers and other cybercriminals!

We all lead very active digital lives, and our devices and presence are part and parcel of who we are, whether we like to admit it or not.

It might take minutes or months but it’s worth ensuring that things are in order so they add value to our lives. After all, as Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said, “for every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned.”