I am officially on my Winter Break, and am in the process of organizing after my finals week. During finals week and many other busy weeks during the semester I saved many of my files in the wrong folders on accident, and saved lots of blog images to my desktop so that I could find them again. But it’s definitely time to do my yearly clean with my accounts and computer files to get ready for the New Year! I thought I would go through my typical routine for organizing all of my files and accounts, as a lot of it involves blogging as well!
Computer Clean-Up:
Since I use my computer for my college and blog work, it can definitely get a bit cluttered! I always make new folders before each semester for my new classes, but somehow I always end up with files all over the place despite my attempts at being organized. So at the beginning of break I first go through my old files to see if there are some that I can delete from a year or two ago. I then open up a few Finder file windows to do the rest of the clean-up! With this process, I go though and determine the files that need to be moved to a certain class. I also look in folders that I’ve already created, because the default saving function sometimes puts them in the wrong place.
Once I’ve sorted all of my files, I then create a new folder for the new semester and new class folders for all of my upcoming assignments. This saves room on my computer, and also ensures that I start the semester off organized and sure of where everything is. I also go through all of my blog photos and delete them from my desktop or downloads folder, and start fresh for the New Year. I also backup all of my existing content in DropBox just to be on the safe side!
Email Clean-Up:
Between my email accounts, it can be hard to keep on top of deleting messages I don’t need on a regular basis. Because of this, I make sure to go through all of my email accounts over break and delete unnecessary and old email messages. I also go through my spam folders, which actually accumulate quite a few messages! Having a decluttered digital presence makes me feel much more organized and ready to handle what’s ahead!
Photo Clean-Up:
My phone photos (and photos that get uploaded to my computer) also tend to get quite out of sorts, and cleaning them up makes room for new memories! I also like to save photos to my hard drive and to DropBox or Google Drive to make sure that they last through any mishaps (such as when my phone of almost two years decided to stop working properly a little while back). Sometimes I’ll even edit a few and make fun collages for celebrating the end of a year. 🙂 It’s always great to have a fresh start for a new semester!
Subscription Clean-Up:
I also take the time to look over my subscriptions for YouTube and other social media sites to make sure I am still interested in them, and take the time to find and follow new ones. It’s always interesting to see how much my interests have shifted in a year! I also like to clean up my Pinterest boards, likes, etc. to make sure that I am up-to-date on everything for the New Year. With Spotify, I clean up my playlists and make new ones based upon my current music interests. I’ve been listening to so much music lately (especially during my delayed travel day) and have been meaning to make more playlists!
I hope you enjoyed this post! I’m getting back into the swing of blogging, but am also planning lots of exciting things for next year! Stay tuned! 🙂
©2016 The Wise Willow and Alyssa DeBella. All rights reserved.
Love this post! I’ve just started getting back into blogging too. Reading this got me thinking about how to clean up my old blog posts and class work.
Thank you so much Andrea! I’m so glad it did! Being on Pinterest always seems to inspire me to organize 🙂
xx Alyssa
This is all so smart. I am a nutcase about keeping all of my folders on my computer, but it does get a smidge out of hand at the end of the year.
Thank you so much Katie!! I completely understand that, it’s so hard to keep things tidy when life gets busy! Thank you for reading!
xx Alyssa