How to clear space on your phone and create a more organized digital life. 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. Table of Contents: 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 […]