Show Your Computer a Little TLC to Combat Clutter

Whether evaluating emails, electronic documents, paper files or physical objects, it's important to remember that you do not need to hold onto whatever is no longer accurate, applicable, useful or bringing you joy. In this day and age, we face an information avalanche, particularly in the digital realm, which is why today's National Clean Out Your Computer Day is so very important.

Our technological devices are being manufactured with a growing capacity for storage; further, online file repositories are offering more and more storage space for free or really low pricing. For example, by referring your friends to Dropbox, you can get up to 18 GB of free storage space; alternatively, for just $99/year, you can get an incredible 1 TB of storage space... Wow! Options like those make it all too easy to keep an excess of electronic documents, making the situation such that most folks have to dig through a great deal of clutter to quickly find what's needed.

Take steps now to combat electronic clutter:

- Review your files and programs for what is still accurate, applicable, useful or bringing you joy.

- Get rid of what doesn't fit that criteria; delete junk files, duplicate files, temporary files and cookies.

- Then, group like with like for what remains. Be sure the placement of your remaining files and programs will make sense to you when you are looking for something.

- Particularly for PC users, make sure you have your computer set-up to automatically run maintenance actions, like a disk cleanup and disk defragmentation.

Originally sponsored by the Institute for Business Technology back in 2000, this National Clean Out Your Computer Day is an excellent time to show your computer a little TLC.

What steps will you take now to clean out your computer?