A few weeks ago I wrote about the internationally best selling book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo. In an expansion of the KonMarie principal to only keep those items in your life that inspire joy, in an article titled "Less is the New More" I wrote from the perspective of making life choices based on the same principal.

Since then I’ve not only minimized my possessions (even giving away BOOKS!), but I’ve also taken a “pregnant pause” approach to all invitations, both personal and professional: does the notion spark joy/excitement/curiosity/any forward-moving energy whatsoever? If not, then I just don’t. There are exceptions, of course. Like, some money-making choices are too necessary and/or lucrative to say no to. So in those cases I say yes to the indisputable joy of being able to buy groceries.

Generally the system works, and I cannot tell you how much I love “joy” as a decision making strategy. It reinforces my intuition and simplifies my choices exponentially.

But “clutter” and the joy it sucks from our lives is insidious. I say this because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about electronic clutter. ELECTRONIC CLUTTER! On our phones, tablets, lap-tops, i-pods, kindles… It’s everywhere we look – literally. A rampant, “pervasive invader,” digital clutter is the chickweed of “stuff.” 

The electronic age promised a paperless society - which it has, kind-of-sort-of (except not really). The trade-off for whatever physical paper we’ve given up is that we have a shit-ton of electronic “stuff” in it’s place.  The fact that most of us own and operate multiple devices increases the accumulation ten-fold. All that “stuff” takes up it’s equivalent shit-ton of psychic space too – something you don’t realize until you start to off-load a bunch of it and feel… relieved.

What is electronic clutter? It’s 1500 emails in your inbox 1100 of them unread. It’s 10,472 files in your email delete folder (this was my actual number). It’s 27 newsletters you’ve subscribed to that come into said in-box weekly (or God forbid daily), only 3 of which you actually open. It’s an address book of 600 contacts, 250 of which are no longer current and another 200 that are duplicates.  It’s 14 apps on your phone and you only use 6 of them regularly). It’s downloaded movies, books and music you haven’t watched/read/listened to in 3 years or more. It’s 2 years worth of text conversations. It’s 1500 pictures sitting on your phone. It’s that box of thumb drives and memory cards with pictures from 6 Christmases or projects ago (that you have never looked at), etc. ad nauseum, forever.

And while I can’t prove it, I’m pretty certain most of that digital clutter is not inspiring one iota of joy.

If that's not enough, all your electronic clutter is consuming virtual warehouses of storage. To be clear, the KonMarie Method is explicitly not about acquiring better organizational tools or buying more or better storage, it is about eliminating so that you do not need to purchase more storage.  

You don’t need a better “user-interface design” to help you minimize the number of icons you see on your desktop, for instance; you don’t need more cloud or dropbox space to store your eight thousand documents, photos, movies and music; you don’t need a service like “Treasure My Text” (I kid not) that will save ALL your text messages, forever (digital hoarding, much?). No, you need to straight-up purge.

The road to joy starts with taking action. Marie Kondo says there are only two reasons we can’t let something go: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future. In my experience, this is as true for digital excess as anything else and a good touchstone for making choices about what stays and what goes.

The KonMarie Method proposes starting the elimination process with what’s easy and working your way to what’s hard (in the real world this means start with clothes, end with sentimental objects). In this way I propose starting with the physical side of electronic clutter.

In my own case I began by ditching the bewildering box of cables and attachments I have had forever. Why do I keep all this stuff?? It gives me no joy (for sure), and it’s a big fat lie that it’s some kind of contingency supply. No: this is where cables go to die! Because the truth is that I USE all the cables and attachments I need! Seriously, duh.

Likewise with the old phones and dead I-pads hanging around. Recycled! The box of thumb drives and memory cards? I literally just threw them out. As long as I have had them (Five years? Ten? More?) I have never – never! – looked at them. Am I ever going to? Unlikely. I am good at printing off pictures (Please. The giant Rubbermaid bin of photos will be my KonMarie Waterloo. Another story.) so I just… yeah. Buh-bye (shrugs).

And for those of you still hanging on to CD-Roms? For the love of all things good, throw them out! Every manual to everything in the world is available online, I promise.

Other ways to minimize electronic clutter:

• Unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t read. They clog your inbox and consume precious time to delete every week. My great “July Unsubscribe” felt like taking off my bra at the end of the day: remarkably freeing. And easy! I can’t recommend it enough.
• Unfriend Facebook friends who don’t, frankly, inspire joy. Maybe they even inspire the “eeps.” OK, you’re related and OK you worked together 10 years ago, but if the chance to see them in real life doesn’t excite you a little, forget about it.  Don't let "hurting their feelings" stop you either, as they aren't even likely to notice - Facebook won't send anyone an "unfriend" notice.
• Delete your annoying and least inspiring Twitter follows. NOTE: there is no law stating you have to follow back every person who follows you first. You’re the boss of your Twitter account! Same holds for Instagram, by the way. 
• Clean up your desktop! If you really must keep all those XL files, pdf's, inspiring quotes and cat meme's - put them in a folder

• Delete all apps you don’t regularly use from your phone, tablet and/or desktop.
• Print the photos off your phone, then delete them – and make space for new snaps. If you have music on your phone you haven’t listened to for more than a year, get rid of that too. And there is NO reason to keep a year or more of text messages. Delete, delete, delete!
• Merge and clean up your address book: you may have 250 contacts, some of which are listed three times each. I appreciate you’ve learned that the middle “mom” gets the home phone and the top “mom” is her email, but spending a half hour merging your contacts will save you mental grief and reams of storage. Delete old contacts and delete all duplicates. Spend a few minutes each day and chip away at it.
• Documents. This is a big one for me. I still have cost reports, funding applications and resumes from people for projects that are damn near 10 years old. You know, in case I ever need to refer to them…Gah! I’ve been slowly cutting them from my hard drive, spending a bit of time each week. I also discovered something called “Duplicate Cleaner.” Duplicate Cleaner  scans and removes all duplicate files on your computer– audio, doc or images. (You can download a free 15 day trial to remove up to duplicate 100  documents). I was mortified to learn I have nearly 1000 such items; upwards of 100 MB of memory!

I want all of us to find more joy in all areas of our lives – including the electronic one. Like physical clutter, digital clutter is a burden. You know, that smartphone/I-pad/laptop you spend more of your day staring at than you do at your own children? Yeah. Clean them up and release your joy!