What do you love about your life or life itself?
I often meet people and think I wonder why I’ve met you, why you’ve come into my life and then I kind of get excited about wondering about the reason why we meet. Also something that happens when we get a little bit older is we realise that we stress about so much stuff when we’re younger and actually you can just let it all go because night’s going to follow day, day’s going to follow night and we can just get on with our lives. So yes, I’m definitely with you on that one.
Can you just tell us a little bit about what decluttering is and what it means?
For me decluttering is really the act of removing anything from our lives that doesn’t add value to it and that value can be practical value, like my vacuum cleaner. My vacuum cleaner doesn’t spark joy in my life but it definitely adds value and makes my life easier.
Most people are familiar with the concept of physical decluttering, so cleaning out a closet or a junk drawer things which I love to do, but I work with people in the space of digital decluttering and getting rid of all of those intangible things, things that maybe aren’t necessarily taking up physical space in our offices, in our homes, in our lives, but they are definitely taking up energetic space and weighing us down mentally.
What are the effects of living amongst clutter?
There’s a lot of studies about the effects of physical clutter and there’s more that’s coming out about specifically digital clutter. Your brain does not make a distinction between physical and digital clutter and if you are consistently in a cluttered environment, things like focus and productivity go down, mental fatigue increases. But what that’s doing is it’s riggering that flight, fight or freeze response because it’s very overwhelming. Studies have linked things like being in a cluttered environment for an extended period of time to higher instances of heart issues and lower immunity and how we fight off illness.
What’s the best, or simple way to at least get rid of some of your digital clutter or to sort it in some way? What steps can people take?
I love this question because a lot of people I work with are like burn it all down, let’s just chuck it out the window and start over and you know, I’ve spoken with people who are like, I just want to abandon this email address, get a new one and I will just start over but we can’t because emails like our cell phone numbers now are so tied into so many parts of our lives. So if you are a person who’s like I hate my email, I have so many un-reads I don’t even know where to start, really where you start is you need to stop the flood of emails because we can delete emails all day long, but if they just keep coming it’s a never ending battle and that feels really defeating. The first thing to do is to start unsubscribing from emails you never read. If you take the time to actually unsubscribe from these emails, they will stop coming.
How can you create folders on Google to better manage your digital clutter?
At the top right of Chrome you’ve got those three dots, click those three dots and you get a drop down menu with new tab, new window, etcetera. If you hover your mouse over bookmarks, it’s gonna pop out another menu for you and then if you click Bookmark Manager, what that’s going to do is open up a new tab and show you your bookmarks.
Now, in this new tab, in this new window that you’re looking at, at the top of the window, it says Search bookmarks, go a little further to the right of that and there’s three dots. If you hover your mouse over that, it’ll actually say organise and then when you click that, you can click add a new folder, and you can make a folder and actually take what you have on that page and drag and drop them into that new folder if you want to. Another easier way to do this is in Chrome underneath the URL you might have a bookmark bar. If you right click in a free space there, it’ll pop open a little menu and you’ve got an add folder option there as well.