A Guide to Digital Spring Cleaning

Just like a cluttered desk can make it difficult to focus, a messy digital life can slow you down and add unnecessary stress to your workflow. From overflowing email inboxes to disorganized cloud storage, digital clutter is easy to accumulate over time, making it harder to find what you need and even affecting your well-being. There are also real environmental costs associated with digital clutter, from the increased carbon output to run large data centres to the higher workload put on devices.

Whether you do it just for yourself or alongside a group of coworkers, planning for a regular "digital spring cleaning" event and clearing up some digital clutter is not only good for your productivity and well-being at work but also has environmental and organizational benefits. In this article, we’ll explore why tidying up your digital space is valuable and provide a practical guide with steps on how to do it efficiently.

What are the Benefits of Digital Spring Cleaning?

a) Environmental Benefits

Most people don’t think about the ways that digital clutter (or more accurately, unnecessary digital storage) has a tangible environmental impact. Every email stored, every unused file sitting in the cloud, and every app running unnecessarily in the background contributes to energy consumption, and therefore to the carbon emissions related to our digital lives.

For example, data centres require vast amounts of electricity to store and process information (remember — “the cloud” is actually just a data centre, i.e., someone else's computer). Deleting unnecessary files and emails from cloud storage ultimately decreases energy use and carbon emissions, thus helping to align our digital practices with USask sustainability goals.

b) Organizational Benefits

A cluttered personal digital workspace can waste time and cause frustration, and you may find that cleaning it up leads to better efficiency and productivity, allowing you to find important documents, emails, and resources more quickly. This effect can also carry over into shared drives and storage areas, allowing teams to work together more seamlessly, and without having to sift through outdated or redundant files.

Note also that there can be significant institutional costs related to paying for digital storage and IT infrastructure. On many institutional digital platforms (e.g., Panopto), USask is charged for use based on a storage limit. For this reason, it’s important to eliminate digital clutter and delete unused files to make sure that we are not paying for unnecessary storage.

c) Psychological Benefits

Digital clutter doesn’t just affect work — it can also contribute to cognitive overload and stress. An overflowing inbox or desktop filled with random files can be mentally exhausting. A clean, organized digital space allows for clearer thinking, reduced stress, and more time for focused work.

Step 1: Block Off Time in Your (and Your Team’s) Schedule

Scheduling cleanup events on a regular basis (e.g., annually, semiannually, or quarterly) is a good way to tackle the larger “piles” of digital clutter and then prevent it from building up again in the future. It might make sense for you to align these cleanup events with seasons, work cycles, or major projects. Another approach is to set aside smaller amounts of time (e.g., 10-15 minutes at the end of each week) and dedicate that to decluttering tasks. Whether you plan for larger events or smaller moments, make sure you block the time off in your calendar, and set up some calendar reminders to help you stay on track.

While you are considering the schedule, it’s also a good time to involve other team members. By coordinating your digital cleanup with others alongside whom you work, you can lean on each other for mutual encouragement and accountability, while also seeking opportunities to tackle digital clutter in shared or common storage areas (see Step 3).

Step 2: Follow a Systematic Approach (and USask Digital Storage Policies, as Applicable)

Deciding on some kind of systematic approach in advance will help you more quickly sort through files, and decide what to keep and what to purge. For example, you might identify files, emails, and apps that you actually use and need, and tag/label/pin them for easier access. For other files, a simple rule like "Haven’t used this in the last year? Delete it!" can help you make quick decisions. If you’re unsure about deleting something, consider archiving old but potentially useful documents on an external drive instead.

It’s also important to understand USask digital storage policies that apply to your work, as this will help you make informed decisions about storing, archiving, or deleting files. For instance:

• Data – According to the Data Management Policy, data falls into different categories such as institutional, research, personal, and third-party data, each with different storage and security requirements. Reviewing the Data Classifications and Data Handling and Storage Guidelines can help you understand what applies to your work.
• University records – According to the Management of University Records Policy, files classified as university records must be retained for as long as their preservation is required to meet legal, administrative, operational, and other requirements of the university. Reviewing the list of approved Retention and disposition schedules can help you understand if this applies to your work.
• Platform-Specific Digital Storage Policies – This refers to third-party (non-USask-specific) digital platforms and tools, such as Microsoft 365 and Canvas. These platforms have specific retention rules, which affect access and storage limits when employees or students leave or when content remains unused for extended periods. For example, there is a specific Panopto Retention Policy that outlines when unviewed videos will be deleted.

Being aware of these policies helps ensure compliance while you are working to reduce unnecessary digital clutter.

Step 3: Make an Inventory of Storage Areas, and Tackle Them One-By-One

Start by making a list of the platforms, devices, and areas where you store digital files, either for yourself or as used across your team. You don’t need to declutter all of these areas at once – instead, prioritize where some cleanup would be most impactful for you, and also consider how to keep the work manageable given the schedule you’ve established (see Step 1 again). For faculty, staff, and students at USask, some likely areas to check for digital clutter would be:

• Email inbox (e.g., Outlook) – Delete old emails, unsubscribe from mailing lists, empty spam and trash folders.
• Cloud storage files (e.g., OneDrive) – Organize files into meaningful folders, and remove duplicates and obsolete files from old projects. Watch for redundant and duplicate files that are needlessly stored both in the cloud and also locally on your own device.
• Desktop and local folders – Keep your desktop clean and structure files in well-labeled folders. Remove outdated PDFs, installers, and documents you no longer need from your “Downloads” folder, and empty your “Recycling Bin” or “Trash” folder.
• Videos (e.g., Panopto) – Delete duplicates, obsolete recordings from old courses, and anything unlikely to be viewed again in the future.
• Apps and software – Review your machine to uninstall apps and programs you rarely use, and check permissions for apps that might be using data unnecessarily.
• Browser bookmarks, extensions, cache, and cookies – Clean up outdated bookmarks and remove unnecessary browser extensions, and periodically clear your web browser’s cache and cookies to free up storage space.
• Shared team drives and servers (e.g., Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Jade) – Coordinate with other team members to schedule some regular review and cleanup of shared or common storage spaces. Be mindful of instances where multiple team members might have their own duplicate versions of a file stored in different places, and where keeping a single shared “final version” can cut down on redundancy.

Again, remember that you do not need to clean all of these at once! Start with identifying just 2-3 of these areas to tackle first and adjust as needed to make sure the cleanup work fits into your schedule. From there, the satisfaction of some newfound digital cleanliness just might give you motivation to keep going.

Step 4: Automate Where Possible

Wherever you can, look for ways to automate cleanup work and make it easier for yourself in the future. For example, you might set up email filters and unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read to cut down on unnecessary clutter in your inbox. You might enable auto-delete functions for clearing out old emails, messages, or files (e.g., on your Recycle Bin folder). There are also cloud storage settings to help you identify and remove duplicate or outdated files automatically.

Step 5: Make Cleanup Part of Your Routines

As you start to think more about how digital cleanup fits into your work (and where the digital clutter tends to accumulate), look for ways in which you might adjust your regular workflows and processes to make regular cleanup part of your routines. For example, after submitting final grades at the end of term, it might be a good time to routinely archive assessment files or correspondence associated with completed courses by moving them to an external hard drive, and permanently delete any files that have passed their retention and disposition schedule.

 

Conclusion

A digital spring cleaning is more than just a one-time effort — it’s an ongoing practice that can enhance you and your team’s productivity, cut down on some stress in the workplace, and also reduce your environmental impact. Start small by deleting just a handful of unused files today and gradually work on incorporating more regular digital decluttering into your routine. By making mindful decisions about what to keep and what to discard, you’ll create a cleaner, more efficient, and more sustainable digital space.

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^{Title image credit: nadi0 on Flickr}

^{This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.