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?
***
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.
Sharon says
I have documents and pictures which are no longer available online.
Linda says
I read these posts with great interest. My external hard-drive is in the process of being slowly de-cluttered and re-organised. My main problem is with duplicate copies. However I feel that posts like these fail to take into account people like me who have thousands of files which we have created (in my case powerpoints, and documents for my job – teaching) and which are not available anywhere else. These need to be organised but just because I have not used a file in the last 2 years doesn’t mean I won’t need it again in the future if I move to another school where I am teaching different topics.
Chris Brightwell says
Any article that diminishes the importance of regular personal backups is spectacularly flawed.
It might mean adding an external hard drive to your laptop bag, but even then you’ve only solved half the problem. You still need something off-site (what if your house burns down? or your laptop bag is stolen?), and you can do that easily and in the background with a site like BackBlaze.
As we become more dependent on technology and do away with tangible collection of music, photos, movies, books, and more, it’s more important than every to keep a strict, defined backup regimen in place. Otherwise, everything can be gone in a single poof of smoke.
chee ming says
I store all my password and id in a text file, and drop in dropbox, I think as a true minimalist, we should not depend on too much software, on my mac I only have one system and 2 two programs, they are photoshop and illustrator, I used to use final cut pro, but after I lost all my video clients in a sudden, now I focus on design and photography.
MissMinimal! says
I love your blog and your advice! I have been practicing to be more minimal and I passed by this blog. I just love the simple design :)
I deleted a lot of my digital clutter and I can say I have NOT missed a single kilobyte of it, and I have not needed anything I deleted. It started out when a friend and I decided to burn DVDs and keep movies. I kept a ton of movie files in my external hard drive which held around 700GB. I also saved a ton of pictures, wallpapers, random images, ebooks, computer games, music, videos, programs, and the list goes on!
After realizing my hard drive was nearly stuffed with so much stuff, I was wondering to myself, *what happens if the hard drive fails and all this stuff gets deleted?* God forbid it fails! But, I slowly started to delete things I did not need. I deleted the movies and then music and cleared the hard drive nearly 70%. Now, after they were gone, I did not miss them and if I kept them and my hard drive failed, I would think I wasted my time downloading all this stuff and lost it. But now, I do not even worry that my hard work is gone! I live and learn :) I then deleted a ton of downloaded fonts, Photoshop brushes, random images, my entire game library, and programs I do not even need. I barely use 5GB on the external hard drive now and can actually fit everything on a flash drive!
Basically, I only save my important documents and memories. I also keep backups on two other flash drives too.
I also have very few programs installed on my laptop because I hate programs that are there for no reason or take up space for nothing. I am down to an image editing program, a PDF reader, a chat client, anti-virus program, media player, DVD burning program, and Microsoft Office!
ming fai says
guess what I write down all my password on a piece of paper, so that I never lost it, and does not need to buy anything like 1password to organzie my password
Vanessa says
I was just thinking about this very idea…how our computers create clutter as well. Luckily (in a weird way) my laptop has been reformatted more than a couple of times within the past month or so, therefore my programs are quite minimal. It’s sort of like a forced clean up.
But I definitely know what you’re talking about in the Google Reader department. After not having said computer working for a while, my reader started adding up and definitely caused me stress. I think it’s time to start pruning! Thanks for this post! :)
-Vanessa
whitney says
I do a periodic Google Reader clean out and it always fills me with relief. I also declare “Reader bankruptcy” from time to time and just mark everything as read.
Thanks for the tip about Hazel, I’ll give her a whirl.
Vamosverde says
Is it true that having lots of icons on the desktop slows down your computer?
ming fai says
for slow computer yes, if you got a fast computer, you won’t feel it
Adrian Short says
I’ve got a Hazel rule that cleans up every file and folder on my desktop that hasn’t been opened in two days into a folder called Cleanup. I almost never have to go into the Cleanup folder to find anything.