How can Marie Kondo's tips be applied to technology?

This year the Japanese tidying guru made waves with her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, in which she visits various families’ homes and helps them to declutter their lives with her trademark KonMari method.

Though her specialities mostly lie in tackling the increasing number of physical items overrunning your home, her philosophies can just as easily be applied to other messy aspects of your life, such as digital clutter. Take a look at some of our steps below to see how you can take back control of your technology by ensuring that your devices spark joy.

Apps

One of the quickest and easiest ways to clog up your devices is by downloading too many apps. Chances are you don’t really use half of the free games or tools you have on your home screen, so sorting out the ones you regularly use and getting rid of the rest is a good way to start decluttering your tech life.

Start by making a list of your most important apps and then get rid of anything you haven’t opened in a while. If you think you might need some of them in the future, just remember you can redownload them in seconds free of charge.

Once you’ve got your app library down to a more manageable size, arrange the ones that survived the cull into categories such as social media, work, and fun. Keep them in a neat and easy to locate order on your home screen and you’ll find that there are fewer distractions in your life.

Social media

Social media can be great, but if you’re following the wrong people it can quickly turn into a place that does not spark joy – quite the opposite in fact.

A good way of organising your online experience is to go through your social media accounts and decide what type of content you most want to see. With sites such as Twitter and Instagram, it’s easy to end up following a whole bunch of people, communities and brands that you’ve lost interest in over time, or that have changed significantly since you first engaged with them. It may take a while, but by assessing your following lists and cleaning them out a little, you’re already on the path to taking back control.

Facebook may be a little harder, as your friends list is likely made up of people you actually know, but there are still ways you can clean up your news feed. For example, pages you’ve liked over the years often have a habit of turning into unnecessary clickbait accounts, so begin by unsubscribing from the ones you’re no longer interested in and you’ll soon find that the content you encounter each day is less cluttered and more relevant.

Emails and inboxes

Sorting through your emails can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve got messages in your inbox that date back several years. The likelihood is that you’re never going to read around 80% of your inbox again, so the easiest way to clean it up is to take drastic measures – that means deleting everything you don’t need.

If you use your emails for more important things, such as work and socialising, then that might be a little more difficult, but there are still ways around it. Try making separate folders for specific types of emails or topics, as this means they’re all in a safe place for you to go back to when necessary. Everything else, such as newsletters from websites you’ve visited once, or shopping receipts that date back several years, should be deleted, giving you a nice clean inbox where you can start from scratch.

And of course, following one final check through your junk folder and trash, make sure to empty them both. This will free up a lot of space, simultaneously removing those annoying notifications that constantly remind you about the 3 million unread emails that you simply don’t need.