Is It Time To Spring Clean Your Digital Space?

For many Brits, cleaning the house from top to toe is just as much a part of early spring as lighter nights, daffodils and the arrival of Easter eggs onto supermarket shelves. The mental and physical benefits of spring cleaning are well documented, but despite the average Brit spending 3.81 hours on mobile devices each day, we often neglect to clean up of our digital spaces. Here, mobile operator spusu explores the impact of digital clutter on our productivity, wellbeing and wallets, and explains how we can spring clean our mobile devices.

Hoarding is easy to ignore in our digital world. When physical letters and photographs were the norm, it was far easier to be selective with what we kept. Now, however, the average Brit stores over 3,000 photos on their phone, with UK workers having around 650 unread emails stacking up their inboxes.

Overflowing inboxes and busy camera rolls can mean spending extra money on additional cloud storage, and can cause phones to run more slowly. Excessive images, messages and apps eat up device memory and overwhelm the phone’s central processing unit (CPU), making the devices run at a less than satisfactory speed.

Clutter not only slows down our phones, but can also slow us down. Having to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of messages to find the right one can reduce productivity, while frequent app notifications serve as distractions from more important tasks.

To help you digitally declutter, here are spusu’s top tips for spring cleaning your device.


Eliminate those emails

Email newsletters are great for brands’ digital marketing efforts, but not so great for your phone storage. To clear up your email inbox, it’s a good idea to unsubscribe from updates that you don’t need or read.

Mind the app

From parking and payments to menus and medical appointments, these days it seems like there’s an app for everything. Most iOS and Android device settings have a list that allows you to easily view all the apps downloaded on your phone, as well as how much storage capacity they take up. Delete the apps you don’t use and categorise those you still need into clearly labelled folders. If you think you’ll need an app again but don’t want it cluttering your home screen, you can hide the app by pressing and holding your finger on it.

Purge duplicate pics

When trying to capture the perfect picture, many of us are guilty of taking multiple shots at once. And really, only one of those ever makes it to Instagram. Many Apple and Android phones come equipped with duplicate detection that allows you to easily delete images with multiple copies. If your phone doesn’t offer this feature, it is worth doing this manually, tackling a set number each day to make the task more manageable.

Going forward, imagine you are using a film camera rather than a smartphone for your photographs. If you wouldn’t use up precious film taking the same picture from different angles, you probably don’t need all those duplicate snaps on your phone.

Phones are a huge part of our daily lives, so keeping them clutter free is just as important as keeping your house in order. Giving your device a spring clean will leave you with a tidy digital space and a tidy mind.