Simplify Your Phone: An Easy 15-Step Digital Decluttering Guide
Updated on January 7, 2025
How to clear space on your phone and create a more organized digital life.
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Not going to lie, I’m mostly writing this post to motivate myself to clear the digital clutter on my phone. As much as I’m good about keeping physical clutter under control, I find it way too easy for my iPhone’s digital clutter to get out of hand. Below, I’m sharing my step-by-step process for clearing digital clutter from my phone to keep it running smoothly and hassle-free. If you need to clear space on your phone because it’s full or could use a good clean-out, follow this easy digital decluttering guide to achieve an organized phone.
Every so often I’m forced to clean out and organize the digital files on my phone when a certain thing happens: I try to take a photo, but my iPhone tells me the storage space is full. Then I find myself scrambling to delete unnecessary screenshots, offload apps, and other ridiculous tricks to gain back what little space I can manage, just to make my phone usable. It’s frustrating and, at times, stressful.
Our phones are constantly buzzing with emails and notifications, and we’re filling our storage space with messages, photos, videos, and file downloads daily, which is why adopting a minimalist mindset toward digital decluttering can feel transformative. Simplified digital spaces reduce stress, increase focus, and give you more time to be present in your daily life. It’s not about achieving perfection, but creating a calmer, more intentional digital environment.
Here I’m sharing a step-by-step guide to digital decluttering for your smart phone, including decluttering and organization tips for each step, where applicable. I’ll share my recommendations for physical and cloud storage backup, as well as why it’s important to keep your digital files under control, as the consequences of digital disorganization can be more serious than you may realize.
I’m going to take you on this journey with me as I declutter my phone — doing it the right way, not the temporary shortcuts I mentioned earlier — so you can follow along and declutter your digital files, too. If you have a lot of files, you might have to break this up across numerous days.
Follow this phone digital decluttering guide to get your device back to an optimal state and enjoy less stress as a result.
Why It’s Important to Keep Your iPhone’s Digital Files Organized and Free of Clutter
When your devices are full they won’t work correctly
Remember my story about not being able to take a photo because my iPhone ran out of storage space? That’s just one example of how a device will stop working properly when you have too much digital clutter. Other things that can go wrong are your email can stop updating, text messages stop coming in, and apps won’t open, among other inconveniences.
When your devices are full it prevents them from updating, including installing important security updates
iPhone operating system updates, as well as application updates, rely on having a certain amount of free space in order to install the updates. Without them, your devices can be vulnerable to hackers and malicious attacks. Also, keeping old apps on your phone that you no longer use, and haven’t been updating, can be a security threat.
Digital Decluttering Guide for Phones
We’ll look at decluttering our screenshots, photos, videos, apps, notes, texts, emails, contacts, voicemails, browser bookmarks, and browser tabs. Then we’ll make sure our operating system and apps are all up to date. I have an iPhone, but decluttering should be a similar process for Android phones. After all of this is completed, we’ll declutter our social media accounts.
For each step, I’ll let you know what to do to accomplish the step, and I’ll also share my own digital decluttering journey so you can follow along for motivation. As you can see in the above photo, I’m starting this process with my phone storage almost maxed out.
Step 1: Declutter Screenshots
What to do: Open your screenshots folder and delete everything that you don’t need anymore (on an iPhone, they can be found in the Photos app > Albums > scroll down for Screenshots). By deleting them, they’ll get moved to your recently deleted/trash folder.
If you don’t urgently need space, you can leave these files in the recently deleted/trash folder, and they’ll be deleted from your trash in 30 days if you don’t recover them first. If you urgently need space, go to your recently deleted/trash folder, review everything quickly to make sure you want to get rid of it permanently, and delete it. Note: You won’t be able to get it back after doing this.
My digital decluttering journey: I didn’t realize that I take screenshots often, but my phone currently has 2,023 screenshots, so apparently I do. Many of them are things I needed to reference temporarily and no longer need, so I filed them appropriately or deleted them.
Step 2: Declutter Photos & Videos
What to do: Go through your photos and videos and delete any that you don’t want anymore. Connect your phone to your computer, and copy your photos and videos to your computer. I then recommend backing up your photos in two places: a portable hard drive and cloud storage. First, copy your files to a portable hard drive — some popular brands are Seagate, WD My Passport, SanDisk, and LaCie. Once that’s completed, copy your files to cloud storage — such as Amazon Photos, Dropbox, or Google Photos. Note: iCloud isn’t included here because it syncs from your phone, so deleting the photos from your phone will also delete them from your iCloud storage — don’t make this mistake. Once your photos are safely backed up in two places, you can delete them from your phone.
My digital decluttering journey: Decluttering phone photos is my most dreaded task. I love taking photos and videos, perhaps too much, especially while on frequent walks at the beach and of my dog. Before tackling this decluttering step, I had 15,430 photos and videos in my iPhone’s camera roll, taking up 83.23 GB of space. I was then able to get it down to 0 by moving them off of my phone. I always back up my photos on a portable hard drive as well as cloud storage, just in case something happens to the portable hard drive, or if I want to access a photo when I’m not at my computer.
Step 3: Declutter Apps
What to do: Review all of the applications on your phone and delete any that you haven’t used recently and don’t plan to use in the near future. You can always re-download them to your phone via the app store if you need them in the future.
My digital decluttering journey: For decluttering apps, I was able to identify 9 apps on my phone that I hadn’t used in over 3 months, and deleted them.
Step 4: Declutter Notes
What to do: Open the notes app on your phone and delete any notes you no longer need. If any notes contain information that should be kept somewhere else, or action items you’ve been putting off, take care of them now.
My digital decluttering journey: I use the Notes app multiple times a day. I use it to remember things, to write down blog post ideas, songs that I hear and like, and more. I love that it syncs from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro, so I can access my notes even when I’m on my computer. Before tackling this decluttering step, I had 374 notes in my notes app. I was able to get it down to 86 notes, which is still a lot, but is much more organized and user-friendly.
Step 5: Declutter Text Messages
What to do: Open your Messages app and look for any that are from automated phone numbers as opposed to family and friends — like texts for verification codes, appointment reminders, payment confirmations, and even spam. If you no longer need these text threads, delete them. If you don’t feel the need to save text messages from people you know, you can delete those, too. Next, if you’re on an iPhone, navigate to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments. Delete any attachments that you no longer need or want.
My digital decluttering journey: This was a relatively easy step in this digital decluttering journey; I was able to find 23 verification and appointment reminder texts to delete. I then was able to delete a bunch of attachments from the Settings section — my large attachments were taking up 14.77 GB of space, which was mostly from me texting videos of my dog — that I don’t need to keep as attachments because I already have the original videos.
Step 6: Declutter Email
What to do: Clean out your inbox by deleting emails you don’t need to save. Unsubscribe from newsletters that you’re no longer interested in, or change the email frequency of emails that you’re interested in but are receiving too often — this is sometimes given as an option if you click the unsubscribe link or manage email preferences link at the bottom of an email. The goal is to get to 0 unread emails. Organize emails as needed, and act on any that you’ve been leaving unread because they need to be acted on. Moving forward, try to stay on top of new emails that come in.
My digital decluttering journey: Email decluttering is another overwhelming task for me that usually takes a few days to accomplish. Between my personal email account, blog email account, and “junk” email account that I use to place online orders and sign up for shopping alerts and newsletters, I had 5512 unread emails before tackling this decluttering step. I was able to get this down to 99 unread emails, which isn’t my goal of 0 unread emails but is a big step in the right direction, and I’m just going to need more time to get through those last 99 because they’re mostly newsletters that I want to read, or things I need to spend time looking into.
Related: 10 Items You Can Easily Declutter From Your Kitchen Right Now
Step 7: Declutter Contacts
What to do: Open your Contacts app and delete anyone you no longer have an interest in contacting.
My digital decluttering journey: This step was relatively quick. In my Contacts I was able to find some former colleagues from probably over a decade ago that I no longer need to be in touch with, some doctor’s offices that I no longer go to, and other numbers I no longer need, and deleted them.
Step 8: Declutter Voicemails
What to do: In your Phone app, navigate to the Voicemail section and delete any voicemail messages that you no longer need.
My digital decluttering journey: For some reason whenever I listen to a voicemail, I never remember to delete it after. So I still had pretty much every voicemail I’ve received since getting my phone, and I didn’t need to keep any of them.
Step 9: Declutter Browser Bookmarks
What to do: Navigate to the Bookmarks section of your web browser app and review your bookmarks, deleting any you no longer need.
My digital decluttering journey: I was relieved to find that I only had 10 bookmarks saved in my browser, some of which went to webpages that no longer exist, some that I no longer needed, and two recipes I had saved that I transferred to my Pinterest account, bringing my bookmarks down to 0.
Step 10: Declutter Browser Tabs
What to do: Open your web browser and go through your open tabs, closing the ones you no longer need. If any tabs are open because you need to act on something, complete that task.
My digital decluttering journey: Browser tabs are another digital area that I struggle with. Did you know that the Safari web browser app on iPhone maxes out at 500 tabs? I do, because I frequently hit that number and need to close some in order to look at new webpages. I’m not sharing this because I’m proud of it, but to keep it real. Before tackling this decluttering step, I had 498 browser tabs open, and after many days of cleaning them out and acting on tabs that needed to be acted on, I got it down to 5 open tabs that are websites I like to go to daily.
Step 11: Declutter Files & Downloads
What to do: Open the Files folder on your phone and go through your files and folders, deleting anything you no longer need, and filing anything you need to keep into organized folders.
My digital decluttering journey: I had 24 files in my downloads folder, and most of them looked like mistakes, like I hadn’t realized I had downloaded something, so it was easy to clean out.
Step 12: Update Operating System
Now that you’ve accomplished the first 11 steps of this digital decluttering guide, you should have a lot of free space available on your phone to make sure your operating system is up-to-date.
What to do: In your Settings, look in the top section to see if any iOS updates are available to download and install. This will ensure you have all of the latest security features and patches, keeping your information as safe as possible.
My digital decluttering journey: My phone had previously told me that there wasn’t enough available storage to install the latest update, so I was happy to now have been able to install the latest iOS to my phone.
Step 13: Update Apps
What to do: Make sure all of your apps are up to date with the latest security fixes by going to the App store, clicking your account icon in the upper right corner, and scrolling down to see if any updates are outstanding. If you have automatic App Updates turned on, you probably won’t need to do anything for this step, unless your phone storage was so full that the updates were previously unable to download, in which case you can do so manually now. If you want to make sure automatic App Updates are turned on, go to Settings > App Store > App Updates > and turn the button on.
My digital decluttering journey: All of my apps were already up to date because I have App Updates turned on.
Step 14: Declutter Social Media Accounts
Although this optional step doesn’t directly affect your phone’s storage space or functionality, it affects your experience on your phone while using social media apps, so this is a good opportunity to declutter your social media accounts.
What to do: On whatever social media apps you have on your phone, whether Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or others, review the accounts and groups you’re following to see if they still serve a purpose or bring you joy. If you come across any accounts that you no longer need or want in your life, or abandoned accounts that are no longer being posted to, you can give them an unfollow.
My digital decluttering journey: I unfollowed some accounts that I was no longer interested in or that hadn’t been posted to in over a year.
Step 15: Enjoy Your Clutter-Free Phone
You can download this phone wallpaper for free here.
What to do: Now that you’ve completed this digital decluttering guide for phones, your phone should have a lot of free space and be simplified as much as possible. Enjoy using your newly decluttered phone!
My digital decluttering journey: It feels good to have decluttered my phone and to have so much available storage space now. It made me want to refresh my phone with a new wallpaper background! You can see all of my free phone wallpapers here if you’d like to do the same. I hope that moving forward, I can get myself to regularly declutter my phone and not wait until it’s almost completely full, like I did this time.
Related: 10 Free Abstract Beach Phone Wallpapers to Transform Your Screen
Save This Digital Decluttering Guide for Phones
Pin this graphic on Pinterest, or bookmark this page, so you can continue to refer back to this digital decluttering guide for phones. And don’t forget to follow Stars & Anchor on Pinterest and on Instagram for more coastal lifestyle and beach inspiration.
Organization: Digital decluttering guide — simplify your phone in 15 easy steps
I hope you’ve found this digital decluttering guide for your phone to be useful! Digital decluttering is a process, so by breaking it down into steps it’s easier to make sure everything is organized and manageable without feeling overwhelming.
It’s good to do an occasional check-in: are those hundreds or thousands of emails, apps, and files serving a purpose, or are they just digital clutter? Delete what you don’t need, unsubscribe from unnecessary emails, and organize your files into folders that make sense. Embrace digital simplicity by keeping only what’s necessary.
Sometimes, less is more, including in our digital spaces. Don’t feel discouraged if it takes multiple days, or even weeks, to get through this digital decluttering guide, especially if you have a lot of files to go through, like I did. If you stick with it, the payoff is worth it.
Do you regularly stay on top of the steps in this digital decluttering guide? Share your thoughts in the comments.
