Declutter your electronic devices

The other day, I wanted to call a friend of mine. When I searched for her contact details on my phone, I noticed I had 3 entries of her with different phone numbers and email addresses. Hm, which one is the last one? I also noticed I had about 180 people in my contact list but my phone bill is less than $10 a month. So instead of doing what I normally do - just getting annoyed and say I will have to fix this eventually - I sat down and fixed it right then and there. I deleted all contacts all no longer need - colleagues from about 10 years ago who now work somewhere else, people I no longer speak to, Regulators I no longer deal with, old medical centres and the list goes on and on. I probably haven't cleaned up my contacts list for 8 years! I removed all the people I haven't spoken to in over a year and then combined all of the double or triple entries and ended up with less than 50 contacts - that includes family, friends, doctors, tradies and current colleagues. I was very happy with that result!

After I cleaned up my contacts, I decided I should clean up my applications. I originally purchased an iPhone and only about a year ago purchased an iPad as it is more convenient for me when I travel. But I still had applications on my phone to play movies. So I cleaned up my applications and sorted them in a logical order.

Digital clutter is a fairly new phenomenon I guess but it can be quite overwhelming. The average household probably has at least a phone - mostly smart phones these days, then there's a computer/laptop/iPad/tablet. This results in having contact lists (phone/email/addresses) and file storage. Files most people store are documents,  movies, music and pictures. Then let's not forget social media such as Facebook, online forums, bookmarks and emails. Pretty overwhelming to keep it all in order, right?

So I cleaned up my contacts and apps and now I actually find stuff. As I travel a lot I have an external harddrive and EVERYTHING is saved on there. I would not leave the plane in an emergency without it. I've got 4 folders on there:
1. Documents
2. Movies
3. Music
4. Pictures

In my documents folder I store all my files electronically: Bank Statements, craft files I downloaded, payslips, Superannuation statements, electronic journal ect. It's important to save the files with a proper name such as '2015 01 Credit Card Statement', so later on, when you search for something at tax time, there it is.

The movie folder contains all of our electronic movies. I've got alphabetical folders and all movies are saved under their name. However, we still have a huge DVD collection. I would love to digitise all of our DVDs but have no idea how to do this, does anyone have some advice?

I have digitised all of our CDs with iTunes and only kept a shoebox full which were signed are meant something special to me. I've downloaded the iTunes Folder on my external hard drive and can listen to them anywhere.

Photos I have ordered by year and then by month, e.g. 2015 - (01) January. If we go on a trip or it's a special event, I create another sub-folder, other than that, all pics from the camera, the iPhone, iPad and anything send to me, is saved there.

I will talk another time about online decluttering. In the meantime, let's try and get organised together. Share your electronic decluttering advise in the comments section and let's see how everyone is going in about a months time. Who wants to join?