Let’s turn “New Year, New Me,” into “New Year, New Organized Me” this time! Before a new year starts, there are a couple of things I like to do to prepare myself for another year online.
Clean up your inbox
Throughout the year I sign up for email lists from various different companies to stay up to date on new products or to receive coupons. It doesn’t hurt to take some time toward the end of the year to unsubscribe from these lists to limit the number of unnecessary emails you’ll need to sort through and delete. Most of the time you’ll continue to receive these marketing emails for another week after subscribing, but once you’ve done this it’s easier to go through the rest of your emails to delete those that are irrelevant and sort them into folders based on categories that best suit your needs. Some examples might be a financial folder for your paperless statements, a shopping folder for keeping track of online orders, and a personal folder for personal emails sent to you by friends and family.
Change passwords
With data breaches occurring more frequently, keeping your information safe online is vital. If you use Chrome to store your passwords, it’s easy to check if any of your passwords have been involved in breaches and change them. If you’re more comfortable keeping your passwords on paper, there are plenty of password journals available online. Of course, a notebook works just fine as well. Ideally, you should change your passwords once a month.
Delete unneeded photos
If you’re like me, you constantly take pictures of or screenshot things to remind yourself of something later. I find that a lot of the time I never remember to go back and delete these after they’ve served their purpose. Deleting these old photos will help declutter your photo album and help make room for new memories.
Delete old notes
My notes app collects old shopping lists and hour-tracking for past jobs. Going through these notes, deciding which ones are still relevant to you and delete the others, and then organizing them into folders can be super helpful when, for instance, you need to find a recipe your mom sent to you last year.
Completing each of these tips will help set you up for a productive and organized new year!
