simplifying your digital life: a guest post

Joe Everett was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and since the age of 7 has lived in 5 states and over sixty homes. This extreme mobility has given him a nack for learning to live simply! He currently resides in Pennsylvania with his fiance, Kim, and owns a consulting company for eCommerce development and consulting for online stores. He is a part time writer of music and poetry and has been writing since the age of 11. His authorship web site can be found at http://jtthomas.wordpress.com.

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Since the beginning of thesimplerlife.net in October, Sam has given us barrels of different and helpful ways he has been able to simplify his life. We all know that when you get down to it life is full of clutter in almost every area. Any successful person will agree that if you would like to increase productivity in any aspect your life, regardless of what it is, organization is required which in turn requires you to eliminate as much clutter as possible. Clutter from your office, home, clutter from your calender and non-essential appointments that are not serving any value to you. Since I am in the Web Development industry and do some consulting on the side, I find that the largest area in my life where clutter collects is digitally. After I discovered Sam and thesimplerlife.net I went on a mission to take a figurative Zamboni to my digital rink and smooth out all of those clunky areas where clutter had collected, specifically on my PC; I discovered two key things that made life so much…well, simpler!

1. Uncluttering my hard drive and organizing my files.
If you’re anything like me it is easy to find yourself with your files stored all over the place. In my particular instance I had my web browser saving anything that I downloaded directly to my desktop so it was easy to find. After a while I would get so fed up with the icons on my desktop that I would just create a random folder on my PC and shove everything that didn’t need to be on my desktop into it. After doing this for so long, I could never find anything and sometimes would even download a program or file a second time because I couldn’t find the first one. My solution: I created a folder structure specifically around the things that I did. I took 10 minutes and made a quick hand written list of the types of files and programs that I used every day. I put those items into categories such as “work” and “personal” and then within both parent categories I created two sub categories, “files” and “programs”.

There are so many great methods out there for organizing your files and programs, however I found most of them to be over complicated for my particular needs. Everything I have on my PC can be broken down into one of these parent and sub categories. I also did the same thing on my flash drive, and use it to store anything that makes sense to be on a flash drive which saves me space on my hard drive and its also portable!

2. Centralizing contacts, usernames, and passwords.
Another issue that I tend to run into as I am sure a lot of us do is having a lot of contacts as well as usernames and passwords. I would be on the phone and need to quickly document someones contact information. I would quickly open Notepad, type it down, and store it on my desktop. This obviously is just about as bad as having a thousand post-its all over your desk with numbers written on them. My solution: I use Gmail for just about everything. I store all my contacts in my Gmail account. Most of us can do the same thing with whatever email service or program you use.

Additionally, most of us probably have more than one email address, a Facebook account, Twitter, maybe even Myspace; not to mention if you pay your bills online, like I do, usernames and passwords for those as well. Because every site has different requirements for the format of your username and password, you can not always make them the same. My solution: A password saving program. Even though we are discussing minimalism, I think that adding one additional program to my PC has proved to be extremely helpful. I started to use a program called Roboform. If you are not familiar it is a password protected username and password keeper that puts a small toolbar on your web browser, and the first time you go to a site that requires a login, it prompts you to store it. At that point, it stores your username and password along with the URL of the web site. There is a free and a paid version. The free version stores up to 11 sets of username and passwords and serves me well. Now anytime I need to go to an online bill, or an email account, I just click the button for that particular one, my browser takes me there and logs me in automatically.

Once I uncluttered those two main digital areas of my life, I found my productivity is running at a much higher level because now instead of having to spend time trivially, I can focus on my core areas of whatever it is that I am doing and not have to worry about losing 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there searching for a bit of information, or a phone number, or locking myself out of an account for using the wrong login information one too many times.

These two things helped me greatly. What ways can you think of to unclutter your digital life?

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Sam’s final note: My personal system for organizing my digital life is a little bit different than what Joe has written here. However, I love that everybody has a unique way of tackling the same project. As long as whatever you do works for you, you’re golden. If you’re looking for help in this area, I recommend picking out the pieces of what you read others doing and mold it into your own personal system.

Photo by catepol