Time for a Digital Clean Up: How to Organise Your Devices

Basically electronic spring cleaning🧹

Let’s be real – when was the last time you cleaned out your camera roll or went through the files on your laptop?  

Documents, essays, PDFs, photos and more tend to pile up without you even thinking about it. And when you’re a student, you find yourself saving random things to your devices. That picture of that one slide from your class three months ago? Saved. A copy of notes you made for a unit last year? Also saved. Clear up some space on your devices and sort out those apps so everything is easier to find.  

Swipe through your camera roll. 

Clearing out a packed camera roll can feel pretty daunting. Thankfully, there’s apps for that – Swipewipe and Swipe&Delete. They can help sort out your camera roll and make it feel like a game. It’s super easy to use and can help you clear space in no time at all. All you’ve gotta do is either swipe left to delete the photo/video or swipe right to keep it. Sort through those random screenshots, awkward group pics and random pet photos in seconds. 

While you’re sorting through your camera roll, it’s a good idea to go through your photo albums and delete any that you don’t use anymore or that are just empty. If you wanna make room for some more photos and prevent having to constantly delete pics and vids, it’s a good idea to invest in cloud storage or back up your phone. 

Clear your desktop. 

Organise your desktop by deleting random files that are just crowding up space. Next, organise the remaining ones into folders and any subfolders in them as needed so everything is easy to find. 

If you’re studying and constantly struggling to find assignments or essays, try using a file naming convention. Use a consistent naming system for your files (e.g., date, project name, course). For example: "Project_Name_Date_CourseName” 

Image credit: the braiding post

If you’re someone who used a lot of programs for school or uni/TAFE and you don’t need them anymore but they’re still clogging up the bottom of your screen, sort through them and remove or delete anything you don’t use anymore that just takes up a lot of space. Keep anything that’s super important that you know you’ll need to keep but you don’t need it constantly on an external storage source like a USB or hard drive. Or you can keep your files online through a platform like Dropbox or Google Drive. 

File away stuff on your computer. 

Go through all the folders that you already have and sort through anything that you need to get rid of. A good place to start is your downloads because chances are, you downloaded a lot of pdfs without realising it. Trash anything you don’t use, any big files or programs that take up space and aren’t being used that often.  Keep anything that’s super important that you know you’ll need to keep but you don’t need it constantly on an external storage source like a USB or hard drive. You can also keep your files online through a platform like Dropbox or Google Drive. 

Organise those apps. 

Delete any apps that you don’t need anymore. Sort through the folders where you have a bunch of apps that you probably either downloaded to try once or maybe you downloaded a bunch of specific apps for a trip. Either way, it’s time to ditch ‘em. Also, if you’re using an Apple device, make sure you swipe all the way to the right and ensure all the apps that aren’t on your home screen that you don’t use are gone. 

Sort out your apps into folders depending on what you use them for to make them easy to find.