Digital chaos is essentially all our virtual clutter, and it includes a lot! Our devices can become black holes of chaos, making us feel stressed and distracted quite easily. From our mobile devices to our tablets, laptops, and computers, each of them can contain virtual clutter that can impact us in multiple ways.

At one point, a couple of decades ago, moving everything from physical paper to computers and online was expected to make our lives much more manageable and organized. We all know this has not been the case!

If you have ever found yourself searching for an important document or completely missing an email that cost you money, know you are not alone.

Digital chaos is real, but it can be tamed with the right systems in place.

There are many categories of digital chaos:

• Email
  • Overflowing inbox – with hundreds of emails coming in weekly, it’s easy to miss important ones or forget to follow up on something significant.
  • Multiple email addresses – many people have a work email and a personal email, but we often have many more, from our first email account (Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo, anyone?) to different emails for each side hustle/project. [I am guilty of this as well!]
  • Junk email and spam can fill up our inboxes and make it challenging to find the important emails among the newsletters, promotions, sales, and spam messages.
• Photos
  • We no longer have to worry about physical damage to negatives or printed photos, but that doesn’t mean we can’t lose digital photos because of physical hard drive corruption or because we save them across different apps or services and forget about them.
• Documents and files – even those of us who don’t work at a computer all day have documents that we need to have access to and be able to find later. Including:
  • bills/invoices
  • Insurance docs
  • taxes including what can be written off
  • medical lab work / reports and notes
  • legal files
  • rent/mortgage
  • household bills
  • applications
  • Work-related files could be saved in multiple places or have many versions with names like “final doc”, “final final doc”, “final doc (1)”, etc ;). If you work with a team, this can be a real challenge!
• Storage of these photos and documents
  • Device storage – our devices do have a physical storage limit but can also require paying for more cloud storage space
  • Disorganized folders on devices and in cloud storage
  • Storing duplicates of the same files or photos in multiple places
• Abandoned or outdated projects – unfinished or outdated projects and files that haven’t been touched in months (or even years) can accumulate and take up both digital and mental space, making it hard to focus on current tasks.

Other areas of digital chaos, we might not think about:

• Notification overload – between apps, emails, social media, and system updates, constant notifications can overwhelm us. The constant pings pull us away from our focus.
• Unread messages including texts, emails, and phone calls
• Apps and Software
  • apps on our devices that we downloaded to try but never opened
  • apps on our devices that we used in the past but now are no longer needed
  • apps we used to use that we know have files we might need
• Too many platforms
  • multiple messaging apps, including those used to message the same people on different platforms [i’m guilty!]
  • multiple social media accounts, some we haven’t logged into in years
  • following an excessive amount of accounts making the feed seem overwhelming
  • continuing to follow accounts related to jobs or projects we are no longer working on or interested in
  • multiple task managers
• Browsers
  • multiple tabs left open, some to ‘read later’
  • unused bookmarks
  • extensions – not removing extensions that we no longer use or need
• Messy contact lists – different list on devices and in email
• Passwords and logins – not having a central home for all our passwords and/or regularly needing to do a password reset
• Digital subscriptions to online services, apps, or software we no longer use can pile up, cluttering our financial records and sometimes even going unnoticed until charges appear on our account.

This list might seem silly to some, but digital chaos can have real-world costs, not limited to unused subscriptions. The amount of time wasted trying to find files or information that we know we have somewhere can impact or focus that could be spent on something more substantial. With these types of digital clutter in mind, it becomes even more critical to implement an organized system that prevents this buildup from overwhelming our digital lives.