It is Spring! Many people take this time of year to clean their car, garage, and house in full while doing Spring cleaning. This is the perfect time of year for spring cleaning your digital life as well.
Adults in the United States spend over 11 hours a day on the internet. According to a Nielsen report that includes working, watching movies, social media, listening to music and podcasts, shopping, reading and more. That is more than half of our awake time each day on computers, phones, and tablets.
Spring Cleaning Your Digital Life
Here are some easy and fast ways for spring cleaning your digital life this month.
- Update your applications, internet browsers, and devices.
- Clean up your desktop, files, and folders. Delete anything you no longer need on your computer or laptop.
- Back-up any important files either in the cloud or an external drive.
- Go through your inbox and unsubscribe from no-longer wanted or needed communications. Is there a store you no longer shop at? Unsubscribe! E-newsletters you don’t read anymore? Unsubscribe!
- Delete unused apps and make sure to update any that remain. Pay attention to the app permissions you have set (such as location) and make changes as needed. While you’re cleaning up your apps, take a look at notification settings and adjust those, too.
- Go through your accounts and make sure you’ve got strong passwords in place and add multi-factor whenever available.
Keeping your devices up to date and cleaned out will help the systems’ speed, performance, and of course, will help keep you safer online in the long run.
I try to take a couple of times a year to clean out my devices, change the background images, screensavers, and apps. This way I know that I am updated and ready to go at any time.
Thanks to the Center for Cyber Safety and Education for sharing the information about spring cleaning your digital life.
