Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Matt Madeiro of Three New Leaves. It is also an answer to one of your Frequently Asked Questions.
You’ve cleaned your closet. You’ve decluttered your attic, your garage, every drawer in the kitchen, and can now count the items you own on about five or six hands. That’s great!
How’s your computer looking?
Minimalists we might be, but the hard drive tends to get the short end of the stick. Here’s the thing: clutter is clutter, whether it’s digital or not, and there’s absolutely no reason to skip your computer during your next scheduled cleanup. You might not see the immediate benefits of emptying out the My Documents folder, but a clean, well-organized computer can do wonders for both your ease of mind and workflow.
Here’s a few tips to get you started:
1. Dump the junk software!
It’s not easy. It’s not fun, either, but it’s absolutely necessary if you have dozens of programs littered across your desktop. Take a good look at the applications you use on a daily basis. You’ll find, in most cases, that it’s only a handful, which raises serious questions about the rest still clogging up your task bar.
Do you need multiple music players? What about three or four productivity programs? Probably not. But remember — deleting the icon off your desktop does not mean you’ve uninstalled it. If you’re using Windows, you’ll need to go through the Control Panel to properly uninstall a program. Mac users can simply delete it from the “Applications” folder.
Start uninstalling the junk. It’s usually a slow and tedious process, so split it up over as many days as you can. Every time you start up the computer in the morning, why not uninstall a few useless programs? Your C:\ drive will appreciate the new space, and you’ll have far fewer applications slowing down your startup process too.
2. Clean your desktop!
It might seem unimportant, but a cluttered digital desktop can weigh you down just as well as a physical one. Why would you want to stare at a huge mess of icons every time you turn on your computer?
The best solution is to clean it by hand, deleting files or moving them to their respective folders. If that’s too much work, however, a Windows user can put those icons out of sight by right clicking on the desktop, selecting ‘Arrange Icons By’ and then clicking ‘Uncheck Show Desktop Icons.’ The icons will still be there, but at least they’ll be made invisible. Mac users can check the Preferences for any Finder window and unselect all the options underneath “Show Items on Desktop.” That’ll still leave folders and applications, though you can just move those where you like and enjoy an unobstructed view of your wallpaper.
3. Let Hazel do the work!
I’m not a big fan of background applications, as they tend to hog resources and slow down your computer. I make an exception, however, for Hazel (Mac OSX) and Belvedere (Windows), incredible programs that act like digital housekeepers for your hard drive.
You start by telling Hazel which folders to monitor. The program keeps tabs on my Downloads folder, currently, and runs a set of rules every time I add something new to it (in this case, downloading something from the Internet). Hazel automatically moves pictures, documents, and music to their respective folders, and even auto-trashes files that have been sitting in my downloads folder for more than a week.
Hazel’s power just grows from there. If you’re already stuck with a cluttered computer, why not set it do a sweep through the hard drive itself? Give it a decent set of rules and it can do an incredible amount of work for you, organizing files based on their type and generally making your life that much easier.
I have it set to empty out my trash can once a week, too. Hazel can be set to interact with your files in whichever way you want, making it incredibly easy — and incredibly simple — to keep your hard drive in great shape before regular use starts to clutter it up. The biggest benefit, I think, is in time saved — Hazel works in the background to keep your hard drive well-organized, saving you from doing most of the grunt work yourself.
4. Prune your RSS reader!
RSS readers are a great way to stay updated on your favorite sites, but they come with a price: the infamous “Unread” count, which grows higher and higher if you don’t keep up with your feeds. For that reason, I’ve implemented a pretty strict set of rules for my RSS reader to follow.
I subscribe to less than 10 blogs at any time, and only those that I legitimately care to read on a daily basis. Likewise, I avoid sites that update frequently throughout the day, which normally includes news sites and most commercial blogs. My RSS reader is pretty sparse as a result, but anyone with an Unread count in the hundreds knows how heavy that can weigh on your mind. It’s not clutter in any physical sense, but an unregulated RSS reader can be every bit as stressful.
5. You only need one password!
Passwords are messy business. With more and more sites requiring registration, it’s difficult to keep track of which password goes where, resulting in the same basic set of characters being used all across the web. Password managers like 1Password (Mac OSX) and Roboform (Windows) work wonders, however, by generating — and remembering — complex, secure passwords for each site you login to.
Both programs ask you to set a “master password” that you’ll use to unlock the vault, and from there a simple key combination will auto-fill your login information with ease. The change is a welcome one, and probably the best way to streamline and simplify the dozens of accounts we juggle at any given time.
6. Don’t forget the Internet!
This might be the most important trick of all.
Hard drives aren’t getting any smaller. Just because you can store millions of files, however, doesn’t mean you should. Your computer will thank you for keeping it in clean, organized form, and you already have the most valuable tool for doing so at your disposal: the Internet.
It has everything. Manuals, music, photos and books — they’re all accessible via a quick Google search, eliminating the need to make backups of your favorite content for storage on your hard drive. The most important files, sure, will benefit from a local copy, especially if you don’t have the most consistent of connections. The majority of content you’ll interact with on the Internet, however, never needs to leave the “cloud” and start cluttering up your hard drive.
The “I might need it someday” mentality can be especially strong here, but don’t fall prey to the promise of future functionality. You don’t need it. And if you do, somewhere down the line, a simple web search will provide everything you need.
That’s the real lesson here: even as computers are built bigger, faster, and stronger, the same principles of minimalism — of simplicity and mindfulness — have become more important than ever before. So why not treat your digital desktop with the same respect you afford the real one?
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Matt Madeiro is a minimalist/traveler/health geek who likes computers more than he probably should. He writes about all of those things and more at Three New Leaves. You can also follow him on Twitter.
Jo Fishwick says
I’d really like to do a digital declutter, but I’m not a “tech-head” by any stretch of the imagination! I wouldn’t even know where to start. I know our desktop PC is old because it’s slow and noisy to startup but why throw it away when it works?
I know our OS is Windows 7. When I look at the Uninstall Programs list, it’s long but I don’t understand which items I can delete without it wreaking havoc in things I might use!
Is there a book or tutorial that may be helpful for novices?
Lola says
I’ve got some gorgeous desktop wallpapers that will help you stay organized – it’s free! http://lessons.chickswhocode.com/free-desktop-wallpaper/
andreas arnaoutis says
Unscubscriping from all advertising emails and newsletters was a great to go forward.
Unfollowing everyone from FB from newsfeed preferences freed-up a lot of time as well :)
encryptedmind says
Having more icons in the desktop for Windows is bad for two important reasons. By normal habit its not just icons but also large files folders that we tend to keep in the desktop for ease of access.
Windows runs slower if the Desktop is cluttered, even on and 8GB system, try using the Desktop as your movie dump and you will see what its means over a few days. The other thing is that if you tend to use these system default folders the user profile size increases, this makes auto backup and other tasks a time and space hog.
The other thing is security and worst case scenario accessibility. If your account gets corrupted or a malware attack compromises your machine, you could just remove your hard disk and copy the files that are on the disk that are not in these system folders. The security could be a shortcoming in these situations. I use a separate folder in the C:| drive (or a different root drive) and create a master folder that contains encrypted containers of truecrypt and axcrypt. I also use token files for their security. System folders are relatively kept sparse and thus my computer runs the best it can in this context. Not splitting the root drive has its own benefits as the access times are shortened and not reset for each drive. This actually mainitains your hard drive better. So in this case any emergency would mean a simple folder copy paste for later decryption, while the drive itself can be forensically disinfected or simply formatted.
The psychological aspects of having a disorganized and cluttered system are as real as the real physical thing. Its not about the intangibility, its about the visual reminder and the subconcious backburner that things are not set as you want them. They distract you mind and weigh you down without you continually realizing about it. Its like the gamers equivalent of living in a virtual domain, things get real enough once you are involved for a set amount of time. Keeping things neatly organized into folders like MUSIC, SOFT, ENTERTAINMENT, READS and master labels like that immediately rearrange your massive collection to a handful of labels that can be monitored with ease. So now you know where your movies, music, software and readables are. I keep the backups in portable drives for posterity, and use duplicate remover to remove redundant files on the 4-5 drives that I keep data on. I also use cloud services to store encrypted containers of important data. 5GB of free space on 2 service providers over 2 accounts results in 20 GB free space, that is more than enough for most important documents, photos and other software for me. The bulk of the space goes on movies and music ostendibly with large software taking the 3rd lead. These can be spread over optical disks and back up of backups using extra hard drives if the reasons are good enough to warrant such measures (good foreign movie collection etc). This logically keeps my drives full of space and my mind full of peace. Things can always go wrong but you still do your best and then we deal with it when it happens.
Ideally using the software you need is a practice that comes with experience. Its like anything else, you always need the latest and the greatest all the time. As I think a skilled assasin can do more damage with a knife than a generic sniper with his Dragunove rifle. It boils down to streamlining and efficient use of your resources. As a security researcher, musician and beginning blogger, I think audio production software, reverse engineering +programming tools and word processors are all that I use. Now each of the above sub-domains could diverge to a litany of toolkits. However, I learnt very early on that its not the tools but rather what you do with it that defines you. So now my music production kit is precise and the best that I can afford (not including hardware). My reverse engineering and software development tools occupy a large space, but the essentials are a handful and I use them most of the time. For writing , I use Word/Notepad++ and Live writer.
Another productivity configuration I use is shorcuts. Not the links variety, but what you get after right-clicking the executable icons and set the keyboard modifier shortcuts. For starting Reason I use CTRL+R anytime I want to invoke it.
My most used software toolset –
Reason
Ableton
Word
IDAPro
OllyDbg
WinDbg
Chrome/Tor
Photoshop
Virtualization (Vmware/Vbox) is another saver when it comes to productivity and space saving-
I configured XP and Win7 systems with all my software set and preconfigured and with backup options in hardrives to just copy and paste my usual configurations when required.
The images I use are for – Malware Research (XP/W7/Linux
Web Browsing (Win7)
Audio Production does not really go well on virtualized systems so I stick that on my real one. And does writing really need a virtualized system?
So my setup is all streamlined and it gets all the work done for me consisting of not more than 6-8 essential tools.
Keeping the plugins and settings file separate for immediate use and backup also saves the day. Keeping the set of plugins minimum to the most used and effective also keeps the config time small.
Using portable software helps a lot as well.
Working professionally in these disciplines means to maintain quality output over minimum amount of time alloted. Productivity is on max the whole time and certainly my Windows desktop shortcuts dont create a problem :)
Amanda says
I always declutter my computer like once a month at least. Sometimes you download something and then never open it lol.
richard says
great post! I am subscribing now. Thanks!