Without Dash

When cleaning out your house and car, you probably have come across so much junk. Are you surprised at all the stuff that you found? Some of which you did not even know that you had it, some that were like very useless to keep, some that you kept for a day in the future that will not come. Hopefully you have thrown it all away (or gave it away, or sold it).

But if you were surprised at the useless stuff in your house, you haven’t had a look in your computer yet. Because you use your computer for so many different tasks, like editing your photos, saving music, shopping online, writing a resume, send emails, play games, and very likely update your blog, it is not strange that you have an endless number of programs and files stored on the computer. The sizes of hard disks that are now standard in any computer only encourage us more to never delete anything.

I often get asked for help when some friend or neighbor has computer problems, and very often I am shocked by the clutter on computers; desktop pictures that are nearly invisible because of the icon clutter on top of it, viruses causing popup messages, old SPAM emails left in inboxes, etc. It is difficult to be efficient and productive with such a cluttered computer, but it is also difficult to find which one of the dozens of issues is slowing down the computer so much, or causing the error message.

1. First of all, downloads, documents and photos should not be stored on the desktop. Just like you do not keep all your paperwork, mail, newspaper clippings, and pictures on top of your office desk, but put them in albums, folders, and drawers, you should organize your files in a folder. Go through each and every file that you ever created/saved. Delete it if you do not need it anymore and store it in the right place if you want to keep them. Lots of disk space is not a reason to keep every file.

   If you find that a folder contains more than 25 files already, it is time to start sorting them into subfolders again. The folder ‘Photos’ might contain a folder ‘Holiday 2008’ and a folder ‘Little John’, and you can have subfolders in those subfolders again. Folders should not go on your desktop again, but in ‘My documents’. You can have a single folder on your desktop if you feel you need in which you only save current files that you are now working on.

2. Once all of the files are sorted and organized, you can do the same thing with your emails. Create folders in your mailbox and sort all the emails. In your inbox should then be only emails left that you haven’t read or answered yet. All emails that are handled already should be filed away for future reference, but not clutter the inbox.
3. How about your bookmarks? Do you have a list of dozens of bookmarks or are they nicely organized into folders and subfolders? Under ‘Bookmarks’ there is a ‘Organize’ feature. Here you can create folders and move your bookmarks into the right place.
4. Then it is time to have a look at the programs on your computer. From the ‘Control Panel’ you can go to ‘Add or Remove Programs’ and sort all programs by Frequency of Use. This way you will already find programs that you never use. Delete the programs that you do not need.
5. Feeling cleaner already? Do not forget to make a backup of your files, especially important and legal files and of course your photos. Use a memory stick or disk to make a back up. Many people think that you can store endlessly on the computer and use it to save everything from other sources, like the photos and videos from the camera, the music from the iPod, a copy of their website, etc. Truth is that the hard disk will not last forever and damage is more a ‘when’ issue than an ‘if’ issue (after fice years or so). So, be prepared and always keep a backup.
6. There are still so many more temporary files and downloads that you did not see yet (thanks to Microsoft and their filing system). Through ‘Disk Cleanup’ (for windows, you can find it under Accessories > System Tools) you can delete all temporary files, downloaded program files and of course empty your garbage bin. This might take a few minutes, but will clean out junk that you did not even know you had.
7. Last, you should defragment your computer after a large clean up. Our folder system might look like everything is nicely organized and piled up in a ‘corner’ of the hard disk, but actually it is not. The files and folders that are now left are spread all over the hard disk. To make it easier for the computer to find them back, you can line them up nicely by defragmenting the disk. (Defragment can also be found in the System Tools if you are using Windows XP like I do).

Now, can you feel it? There is nothing better than the motivation and inspiration of a clean computer. It is almost as if you have bought yourself a new computer and could start with an empty disk. Only almost, of course…

With the house, car and workplace cleaned out, the only that rests us to do is keeping it this way. Tomorrow will be the last day of declutter week at Without Dash and we will use that to have a look at how we keep the clutter under control, so next time we do not have such a daunting task of decluttering.

Tags: declutter