Most people say that they want to be more productive, but they’re not always sure how to make it happen. Sometimes it’s simply hard to keep up with the fast-paced demands of everyday life in the modern world. Whether an important work project has taken up all your time or a looming deadline is filling you with a procrastination-inducing dread, it’s all too easy for the work-life balance to be thrown out of whack.
Now that people are interfacing with technology on a near-constant basis, your computer, smartphone, and tablet all become central to your ability to work efficiently. It’s like each one is a domain or office space where you organize your work and personal documents – seemingly, your whole life. When you think of it that way, it only stands to reason that cleaning up your digital world is bound to have a huge bearing on the way you live your life.
Rewire Your Thinking
Whether or not you actually feel impeded by that overflowing email inbox or a desktop unnecessarily crowded with old irrelevant files and unused shortcut icons, it may be having a serious impact on your level of productivity.
Since most people are forced to stare at screens for most of the day, be it for work or whatever other reason – in addition to the recreational screen staring that happens after work (and sometimes during) – the act of interfacing with that technology makes up a huge portion of everyday life. When you feel cluttered and overwhelmed every time you switch on your monitor, it’s going to have profound psychological effects.
People who make a point of maintaining digital cleanliness find a crisper, more relaxing experience. Instead of feeling like you’re precariously balanced and constantly in danger of falling off into chaos, you feel like you’re actually quite sharp and that, with the help of these technological tools, you can take on the world. It gives you a mental sense of where everything is, allowing you to almost sync up with the computer and use it as an extension of your mind, rather than something that you have to fight with every day.
The main thing to aim for when doing a digital cleaning is cutting out the subterfuge. If you’ve eliminated the files you don’t need, you’ll have less to dig through and a clearer sense of what’s important. Once you’ve established a regular system for processing files and information in that way, you’ll feel like you’re hacking your productivity with each digital experience.