What would Marie say about your computer?

Marie Kondo has become famous for helping people declutter their lives.

Her philosophy is quite simple:

Take all of the items out of your closet or kitchen or bathroom, examine each one, and ask yourself, ‘Does this spark joy?’

If the answer is ‘yes’, keep it.

If the answer is ‘no’, discard it.

For the items you want to keep, put them away in an organized manner so the next time you need the item, it’s easy to retrieve.

And, something I imagine she would agree with: really think through whether or not you need to buy another item.

Will it continue to spark joy past the initial rush of purchasing it?

I often wonder how Marie Kondo would go about leading a digital declutter.

For example, does it spark joy for you to have:

• your entire Desktop filled with files?
• your Dock or Task Bar showing lots of open or never used applications?
• Folders on folders on your computer’s hard drive or cloud storage with unorganized, unindexed documents or pictures?
• Browser tabs for as far as the eye can see?
• Inboxes brimming with thousands of read and unread messages?

This definitely doesn’t spark joy for me.

Digital joy for me looks like:

• a clean Desktop with no files on it given all of my files are in the cloud anyway - I have no need for files on my hard drive
• a Dock with only the applications I actually use (Chrome, Asana, Notion, Slack)
• Organized, searchable, cloud folders each with a naming convention - nothing goes in there unless it’s in a folder
• 3 pinned browser tabs in Chrome for websites I use all of the time (Gmail, Gcal, Hubspot) - no other tabs open
• Inbox 0 in Gmail, Slack, and Asana
• The same operating philosophy for my phone (or other digital devices if I owned them)

Now, this sounds like a digital device which would spark Marie’s joy!

What does digital decluttering look like for you?