How to Tidy up Your Digital Life to Find More Time and Energy for the Real World

(Malte Mueller/Getty Images)

In 2014, Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizational guru, rose to stardom with her No. 1 New York Times Bestseller, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” This subsequently launched her Netflix career, and she became a household name and initiated a nationwide frenzy of tidying up America. Her catchy method of cleaning up cluttered homes is connected to a feeling that is all too often overlooked: joy.

Kondo advises you to pick up each item and ask yourself if it sparks joy; if not, get rid of it. But what about things we can’t pick up?

Technology has taken the world by storm and is creating more clutter in our lives than we realize, even if that clutter doesn’t fill the corners of your closet. It clutters something more important than that—our mind and our emotions—and makes a mess of our attention, and more importantly, gets in the way of spending time with the people we love most.

Kondo’s KonMari method, which is quick and effective, is to simply to place things into categories (i.e., kitchen items, clothing, tools), examine each item, and ask yourself, “Does this item spark joy in me?” We can go through each area of our home, section by section, and evaluate the seemingly important items we have grown accustomed to having that now fail to bring joy.

Cleaning up our physical world help us to function better. The act of removing excess can be difficult, but it improves our emotional health. It makes us feel like we are not being controlled by our stuff. This kind of cleaning is straightforward and easy to understand. But how do we clean up our virtual world so that it doesn’t control us? If Kondo’s method is proven to work for our physical surroundings, can it be applied to the ever-growing clutter found on our digital devices?

Yes. This spring, as you refresh your home and do some cleaning, we invite you to explore the idea of “screen cleaning,” as well.

Take a Joy Inventory

Which of our technological indulgences sparks joy in our hearts? Does the social media and other screen information we consume give us real joy? Or is it just dopamine-producing entertainment? Does your son’s gaming habit ultimately bring joy to his world, or are you both continually upset about it? Is your daughter’s social media obsession bringing her real joy?

Just as cleaning out your closets on a regular basis will reduce stress, so will cleaning out your digital stuff. With that in mind, it’s time to clean.

Four Essential Tips to Begin Screen Cleaning

The first step of any decluttering job is to gather all like items together. Bring all of your screens together—tablets, smartphones, game consoles, laptops—in one area of your home (perhaps near a desktop computer). Empty the cable and cord drawer, too. Your kids can help you do this; they know where all the devices are. The purpose is to see what you have and begin to weed out what you no longer need.

Next, reduce the number of screens in your home. The fewer you have to manage, the more joy you will experience. It is OK to give away perfectly good technology; many of us have too much tech or an abundance of older devices. Make a plan to donate phones to a homeless shelter or charity organization, and put all other digital devices—including old laptops that don’t fit your life any longer—in a box for proper disposal.

Determine who uses which screen, and if that use brings joy to members of your family. If your daughter is consuming too much social media on her smartphone, it may be time for a talk/text phone. If your son is wasting time on his game console, it may be time for a digital detox. Remember, the question is about joy. If the screen is bringing your family more pain than joy, toss it.

The third step is to uninstall unneeded apps on your devices. Ask yourself: What apps do I really need to keep as tools, and what can go? Go through your apps one by one, including the ones you use often. Load each app and ask yourself if it sparks joy in your heart; don’t confuse joy with dopamine. If that social media app on your smartphone doesn’t bring you inner peace, you have to wonder why you have it. If you need to keep it as a tool, consider relocating it to your computer where you will use it less.

Remove all the irresistibly distracting apps from your phone that are causing clutter. Just like the clothes and shoes in our cluttered closets, we generally only use a small percentage of our apps. It’s time to uninstall the app that came with your new fridge and the app you read about in a blog but never opened. Organize the apps you keep in a folder.

While you are cleaning out your phone, consider setting it to grayscale. This little tip has a calming effect, and you will look at your phone less.  Go ahead and turn off all your notifications, too. Those likely spark more stress than joy.

The fourth step is to fix what is broken. Fixing broken things, replacing parts, and doing routine maintenance is an important step in any cleaning process. This means restoring what is broken or not set up properly in our screen environments. If a screen is physically broken and will cost more to repair than to replace, get rid of it. If an application isn’t working properly, now is the time to fix it or get rid of it. For example, test your filters and parental controls. Adults as well as children should have filters on their devices to filter out unwanted content, and these filters need frequent attention. When was the last time you read the parental control reports from your kid’s devices? Do you know how to check them? Did you know that a phone update can disable parental control programs, leaving them worthless?

Fix broken things on your bigger screens, too. Clean up the desktop on your computer and uninstall all outdated programs to increase efficiency. When you begin work each morning, you should not be met with a cluttered screen. Uninstall shows and movie apps on your smart TV that you don’t want your kids to access and that you don’t need to be paying for anymore. Now is a great time to reset and organize your passwords and other security measures. Searching for passwords wastes time and feeds frustration. Since kids have a way of discovering your passwords, periodic refreshes give you the ability to successfully guard your family from harmful content.

Enjoy the Benefits

The benefits of screen cleaning are similar to the benefits of cleaning your home. Paring down your screens, keeping only what you truly need, and organizing and removing apps on your devices frees you from stress. It puts you back in the driver’s seat where you are now controlling your environment; it is not controlling you. When you begin to live only with what matters most on your screens, you will experience the freedom that technology is meant to give us in the first place. You will have more time and energy as a result of your screen cleaning, and more time for the people in your life that you love—bringing about the true joy that you’ve been seeking all along.

Melanie Hempe, BSN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, an organization that empowers parents to help their children gain the benefits of screen media without the toxic consequences of overuse that threaten healthy mental and physical development. The ScreenStrong Solution promotes a strong parenting style that proactively replaces harmful screen use with healthy activities, life skills development, and family connection. This article was originally published on ScreenStrong.com.

Five Steps to Screen Cleaning

• Reduce the number of screens in your home
• Clean up the apps on your devices
• Turn phone to grayscale
• Turn off all notifications
• Donate extra screens and phones to a shelter or charity.

The Benefits of Decluttering Your Screens

• Less comparison—the thief of joy
• Less time wasted
• Fewer temptations (to be tempted with harmful content)
• Less anxiety and stress
• Less depression
• More freedom
• More time for other hobbies
• More in-person connections
• More productivity at work and school
• More joy!