One effective way to worry less about your data is to have less of it to worry about. To get there, you’ll need to redefine the word “important” to mean “impossible to get your hands on in future for free”.
Dump Bookmarks and Search as You Go
Nothing gets deleted from the internet, ever. The upside of that? You can find anything you need with a web search.
With that kind of power at your fingertips, you can afford to ditch most of your bookmarks. Of course, you might want to keep bookmarks that link to pages you visit often and those that contain indispensable information.
The trick is to stop treating every bookmark as important and keep your Bookmarks folder super lean, if not empty. With this approach, if you ever need to organize your saved links in any way, it will be as good as effortless.
Once you delete your bookmarks, you’ll need to sharpen your search skills. Learn some smart search tricks to bring up near-instant and accurate matches for any online resource. You might feel surprised how often serendipity steps in to bring you the right information at the right time.
What do you do if your search turns up a dead page?
Hop over to the Wayback Machine section of the Internet Archive to find the original content of that page. You can also dig up other types of free content from that archive. As a last resort, you can also turn to online communities to find the information you need.
From contacts you never call to free ebooks you never get around to reading, what data have you saved because you “might need it someday”? Delete it. You probably won’t need it, and if you do, help is one step away.
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Ready to Hit the Delete Button?
So, what else can you get rid of? We have more ideas for decluttering your data! You can delete:
Emails: To reduce email stress
Tweets: To start from scratch without losing your followers or your username
Unused online accounts and their passwords: After making these changes
Before you start decluttering your digital data, take a step back.
It would be a nightmare to lose passwords, browser settings, tax returns, contracts, and so on. (There’s data you can classify as important!)
Be sure to isolate those bits of information from the rest of your data to avoid accidental deletion and back them up in multiple places. Put the whole backup process on autopilot if you can.
Of course, going on a data deletion spree is not the right approach for everyone. But you’re discerning enough to figure out if it’s the right one for you and how far you should take it.
Now, ready to set free some of your data and never bother about it again? It’ll take time to go through all of it, but when you get to the other side it’ll feel liberating. You’ll be familiar with this feeling if you have given away physical possessions in bulk anytime. Bring it back by Kondoing your digital life.