Google “digital decluttering.” Most articles will tell you to remove unneeded apps from your phone. Or clean up your browser bookmarks.

Yet this advice doesn’t drive a stake into the heart of the problem.

You’re still left with overloaded email inboxes and computer folders junked up with duplicates. This is the real information you sift through every day to find what you need to act on.

So skip the apps and bookmarks, and prioritize your digital decluttering activities where it matters most:

• Your email app
• Photos app
• Computer filing system

Investing minutes to clear out digital clutter in these areas will yield time-saving returns when you need to locate important items later on. As an added bonus, you’ll free up digital space, so you won’t need to purchase more.

4 reasons why deleting is so hard

Most people don’t cull digital information from their personal files in their email, on their computers, or in their digital photo albums.

Often we believe this is due to the fact that extra digital storage feels relatively cheap. We can easily obtain more from Gmail or cloud service providers like iCloud or Dropbox.

Essentially, in the digital world, space constraints don’t prevent us from accumulating more information.

Yet even if digital storage were more costly, most of us would still be averse to deleting files for a the following reasons:

• We think we may need it later
  
  Our information troves contain multitudes that we’ve saved, in the off-chance we may need these items again.
  
  This is especially true for email, which makes up the bulk of our incoming information.
  
  Most of us default to a save-all strategy: it is easier to archive an item rather than consider whether it’s OK to delete it.
  
  Also, it feels better. By archiving everything, we bypass that anxious feeling that something important could be forever lost.
• We believe we need digital evidence
  
  Our email inboxes are awash in transactional messages: upwards of some 40 emails a day nudge us about purchases, deliveries, and renewals.
  
  Many of us believe we should save these receipts just in case something goes wrong—perhaps we may need to return an item.
  
  Uncertain whether we will find proof of our transactions again, we hoard these pieces of evidence in our personal archives.
• Deleting is too much work for too little benefit
  
  Email and cloud storage apps allow us to be lazy about deleting. As we’ve said, more cloud storage is easy to obtain.
  
  So stealing precious time to delete bits and bytes seems silly given the gazillion other things we would rather be doing.
  
  As a result, most of us won’t bother…until our personal information collections get so junk-filled that finding things becomes impossible.
  
• We are emotionally attached to certain files…like photos
  
  We hate deleting photos, which preserve our important memories. We know we can’t recreate these precious moments.
  
  So we keep all 50 action photos of our child blowing out candles at her birthday party, including the unrecognizably blurry ones.
  
  Of course, we won’t ever use most of them.
  
  Nonetheless, we want to maximize our ability to select the perfect memory to include in a high school graduation slideshow that we might put together a dozen years from now.

Excess digital clutter will slow you down

1. You can’t find important items easily

Need to return a sports bra from The Gap…or was it Athleta? Did you buy it online or in the store?

You’ll have to search both your email app and your scanned receipts folder, and maybe even look for hard copies in your wallet.

Starting with a search of your email, you’ll find hundreds of items to weed through:

Although you can quickly scan results by date to identify the receipt you need, excess information will slow you down.

Sure, your phone has too many apps, and you subscribe to too many newsletters.

It’s great to clear these out, but they’re not your biggest decluttering culprits.

Before we get into our 5 digital decluttering tactics, let’s first understand which digital areas cause 80% of your clutter problems.

That way you’ll focus your organizing time on activities that matter.

Recognize that Email is your biggest clutter culprit

In 2023 each of us received an estimated 40 personal emails per day. To find the stuff we need, we must weed through this excess of accumulating messages.

Most of these emails are transactional or informative: either notifications about deliveries or downloads or the latest newsletter from whatever interest groups you’ve joined.

Furthermore, we often receive attachments—in the form of statements, invoices, and photos—that we do want to save. Yet weeding through thousands of emails to find these later is time-consuming.

Any digital decluttering strategies you adopt should include an email management component that eliminates distractions from transactional and informative emails. It should also ensure you download important files to your computer for safekeeping.

Understand that you prefer finding files by digging through nested folders

Our computer’s search, such as Spotlight or Windows Search, are readily available with a simple shortcut (CMD+space on Mac or WIN+E on Windows).

Yet, using the search function to locate files often takes too much mental effort.

With search, we need to recall a file’s name. Yet few of us remember what we’ve named a file we created. And we typically don’t take the time to rename files we’ve downloaded to something memorable.

So, instead of searching, most of us prefer to find files by digging through nested folders. We tap into our natural navigation senses to find things easily.

Studies show this is as true today as it was a decade ago.

So any digital decluttering strategies you adopt should allow you to maintain well-organized nested folders within your computer’s filing system. You’ll rely on them to locate the stuff you need.

Our space-hogging photos provide memories that we need to preserve

Finally, as parents, we tend to be the keepers of our family memorabilia, especially photos and videos.

Yet these types of files are space hogs. Unlike text files and PDFs, a typical photo (3 MB) occupies 30-60x more space than a text-based PDF page (50-100 KB). A minute of 1080p video (20 MB) is 200-40x larger.

Any digital decluttering strategies you follow should give you comfort that you preserve these items, but clear out the space-hogging duplicates or near-matches.

With these strategies in mind, let’s consider a few crucial tactics you can implement today for digital decluttering wins…

Tactic 1: Delete old emails with attachments

At some point, you will run out of the free storage Gmail or other email providers allot you. You could buy more and pay another $2-$10 each month.

However, the biggest email space-hogs are file attachments you’ve either received or sent.

So, if you want to declutter your email inbox and archives yet make the most of your time, prioritize attachments.

A simple search for attachments in your email app will give you a list:

Filtering for attachments will give you a mix of those you’ve received as well as those you’ve sent. Here’s how to handle each type:

Review attachments you receive for files to download

Most of the attachments to keep will be:

1. Photos and videos sent by others: Add these to your photo collection inbox immediately or to your catch-all File-Inbox for later import into your photos app and delete the email.
2. Household records, including proposals, invoices, or statements from local vendors (usually in PDF or Word formats): Download these records and add them to a catch-all File Inbox on your computer immediately. If it is a bill you have to pay, track it in your to-do list app. Delete the original email (or star/pin it for deletion once the invoice is paid).
3. Material for projects you are working on: Add the attachment directly to your project in your Notes app. If needed, jot down any relevant notes in the email body. Then delete the original email (or star/pin it for deletion once the project is complete).
4. Forms to fill out: Download the form to your catch-all File Inbox on your computer immediately. Track completion of the form (such as a medical form, which may have to wait for a visit to the pediatrician) in your to-do list app. Delete the original email (or star/pin it for deletion once the form is submitted).

The bulk of my 400+ emails with attachments didn’t require me to take any action. I could simply delete any of these emails after viewing them.

For the keepers: I typically download attachments into my catch-all File-Inbox folder. Then later in the day, week or month, I can organize them into my nested folder filing system.

I also use a handy Mac app called Hazel to automatically organize files I routinely download to my File-Inbox folder, like bank statements or medical EoBs from my insurance company.

Delete email attachments you’ve sent

Most likely, files you’ve sent to others are already organized in your record-keeping system. Delete them on a periodic spring cleaning basis.

Tactic 2: Use your email app’s auto-categorization to bulk delete transactional items

Some email apps like Gmail offer you the option to have the app auto-sort your inbox emails into different groups or tabs. Typically these categories include some version of Priority emails, Notices, and Newsletters.

These apps use machine learning, AI, and even preferences you’ve trained them on to allocate emails from each sender into these categories.

Importantly, emails that are allocated to the Notices (Promotions and Updates) and Newsletters (Social and Forums) tabs contain transactional or nice-to-know information that isn’t essential for you to save after a month or two.

So. if your email app offers an auto-sorting feature, turn it on.

You can use these categories to quickly select and delete older emails, knowing that the important person-to-person Primary emails are safely kept elsewhere.

Tactic 3: Use a third-party app to delete duplicates in your photos app library

We parents capture a lot of family photos and videos on our phones and digital cameras. Family and friends share their shots with us, too. Plus we inherit entire digital photo collections from loved ones.

These days, photos apps, like the Apple Photos app or Google Photos, protect us from uploading duplicates. We get a warning during the upload phase.

However, some duplicates—or similar photos—slip through the cracks. Further, our digital photo archives may go back many years before these features were available.

So you may have plenty of photos duplicates (or near matches) taking up the bulk of your computer’s storage space.

Today, there are easy ways to cull these from your Photos app archives, using relatively cheap third-party duplicate detection apps. (There are free apps that do this, too, though their interfaces are clunkier.)

A few I recommend will cost you about $20-$40 per year:

1. MacPaw’s Gemini 2 (Mac)
2. Nektony’s Duplicate File Finder (Mac).
3. Digital Volcano’s (Window) Duplicate Cleaner 5 (Windows)
4. Webminds’ Easy Duplicate Finder (Mac and Windows)

These apps will search your Photos library, and then present you with a list of duplicates. They’ll give you easy way to select whichever version you don’t want.

Gemini 2 sets aside the files selected for deletion in a folder within the Photos app, just in case you change your mind.

As you’ll see below, these duplicate finder apps come in handy when you want to delete other types of duplicates from your computer.