There’s something about a new year that gets us into the organizing and decluttering mode. Overly cluttered and disorganized blogs can not only cause frustration, decreased productivity and stress in life.
Decluttering doesn’t have to mean only the piles of paperwork on your desk. It can also apply to bloggers, from your email inbox – to your mind. How often have thoughts of new posts, to-do tasks, and emails to compose boggled your mind … possibly creating sleep issues?
Here are four efficient ways bloggers can declutter:
Set Your Goals
Take your time, decluttering properly a computer takes time and commitment – set your goals. For example do it during a weekend, a holiday or plan 1 hour per day for a week.
Purge Affiliates
Revoke your participation in affiliate programs that are no longer a good fit for your readers. This will instantly reduce the number of emails cluttering your inbox, and save you time not having to open and read, when you know you won’t write a single post about whatever fabulous content is supposedly contained within.
Clean Up Your Old Emails
I’m a natural tosser and I don’t get sentimental about keeping emails. I delete emails every 3 or 4 months – note I have 8 email addresses and receive over 100 emails per day, yes I agree it’s too much and I am working on it.
Create email folders and sub folders
Same system as your computer documents organization, create main folders per task, client, or company, plus sub folders.
For example – I have a main folder for Women Love Tech blog, a PRs sub folder and another subfolder for each PRs companies.
Create a separate folder for your personal emails
Don’t mix business with your personal stuff – this is applying for your work of course but also for your home.
Delete the emails you send
I delete emails I send after each end of month – last month I deleted 811 emails! This is a good tip to clean up the computer’s memory.
– Delete emails with attachments
Emails with attachments will ruin your computer’s memory – keep the ones that are important or place them in one of your folder and delete the others.
Empty your Junk and Trash
Delete your trash and junk emails every day – your computer will love you for doing it!
Delete signatures you don’t use
If you have multiple email addresses, clean up the email signatures you don’t use anymore.
One more thing, please save the environment with not printing emails – an email is digital and should stay that way, plus it will add more mess on your desk – just saying.
Internet
If you are a big Internet user, you will thank yourself for being tidy and organized.
Clean your Internet browser
Internet is not exception for keeping/having a clean computer. First, clear the browsing data also call History (but not the passwords if you are using a personal computer) but a must do if you are using a public computer.
Create a file system
Place in the main tab websites you are using everyday (the top one) and create folders per category for the others. For example have a folder Shopping for your favorite shopping online websites you’ve bookmarked.
Control your time on Social Media
Remove yourself from Facebook groups that are not bringing you up. Join those Facebook groups that are inspiring, motivational, and action-oriented. Remove this clutter and you’ll see it gone from your newsfeed and any email notifications you have set up for those groups. Oh and bonus tip: Turn notifications “off” or “friends’ posts only” for blogger groups. You’ll thank me for that tip if you’re not already doing that.
After you tackle those five decluttering tips for bloggers, you can turn your organizational energy to the rest of your blog.
