Four easy steps to declutter your tech gadGets and enter the world of technology nirvana.

If you live on planet Earth, then you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing consultant, that basically transforms lives through the art of decluttering. Her radical approach has made her a best-selling author and awarded her a Netflix series where you can literally watch people get emotional over the clutter in their homes.

Along that same train of thought, we should organize and transform our tech lives. Here are our life changing suggestions to transform your tech life one cluttered item at a time. 

#1 FORGOTTEN DOWNLOADS CAUSE A LOT OF CRUFT 

Cruft is bad. Terrible. It piles up and uses up a huge amount of storage and can eventually lead to your machine slowing down. (Kind of like those 15 pairs of blue jeans you can’t squeeze into any longer that are taking up drawer space.) Get rid of the duplicates. 

Software cruft are basically “digital dust bunnies.” You know, those duplicate files, forgotten downloads, abandoned files from apps you deleted, and so on. They’re slowing you down big time. Getting the cruft out may sound daunting, but it is actually easy to do. Apple, Microsoft and Google have all joined the anti-cruft global crusade and have added cruft-removal tools to their operating systems. You just need to remind yourself to use them. Read more on How to Clean Out the Cruft here.

#2 OUT-OF-DATE SOFTWARE COULD BE HARMFUL TO YOUR DIGITAL HEALTH

There’s a reason that Apple, Microsoft and Google offer free updates to their phones and computer operating systems. Each update offers more security, less bugginess and makes you love your device more. Let’s face it – they want you to love their product so you will continue to purchase from them in the future. 

Make sure that you update software whenever it is available to ensure that your device/system is running the safest and most efficient that it can. These updates usually help protect your devices with current ways to protect you from hackers and malware.

#3 FALL IN LOVE WITH AUTOMATED BACKUP 

If you’re like the masses, only 6 percent of us have actually set up an automatic, continuous backup system. Because, believe it or not, if you use it long enough your hard drive will die one day. Even the manufacturer admits this in the fine print of the manual. (M.T.B.F “mean time between failures”…look it up).

There are some online solutions that will automate backups, these are great because they are offsite. Whether it’s fire, flood, burglars…toddlers’ juice…your data is safe and not your concern until you really, really need to be concerned. 

#4 SAVE YOUR PHONE’S PHOTOS 

We all have trigger finger. We snap photos at soccer games, weddings, selfies (eh-um) and work to capture the sweetest moments on our phones. But what happens if we lose our phones or they get dropped in a cup of coffee? What happens to all of those moments?

Ensuring you have a cloud-based backup for phones is the rule. You have options like Dropbox, Flickr, Apple’s iCloud and other companies that can back up your phone’s photos and videos, wirelessly and automatically. Or, look into other options like Google Photos and Amazon Photos, they can back up your complete photo collection for free.

The short and long of this story is that you need to clean up your technology like you clean and organize your home. Automate backups and updates, clean out the cruft and live in bliss knowing that you are automatically safe and secure on all tech avenues.