Yesterday, I showed you guys some of the things that I’m using to organize my kitchen and camera accessories. But why stop there? January is the perfect month to get rid of clutter and put some things in order. I’ve decided to start with social media and blogs.
1. Do you use Facebook? Not to be rude or anything, but maybe it’s time for some defriending. Open up your list and take a hard look at who’s there. Is there anyone you wouldn’t miss, or anyone you wouldn’t miss who probably wouldn’t miss you either? Any “likes” that you don’t really like? What about groups you that you joined just to look cool? Delete, delete, delete.
2. Okay, Twitter time. Remember when you wanted to learn ice sculpting, so you followed all those ice sculptors on Twitter, but now you’re really into fire eating and you never read those ice sculpting tweets anymore? Time to stop them from showing up in your feed. While you’re at it, create some Twitter lists so you can just look at the specific types of tweets that you’re interested in at the moment.
3. Do you use Pinterest? It might be time to delete the wedding planning boards that you created before your divorce, or to stop following the woman who only shares dog clothing. If your feed is clogged up with clogs, you might miss some truly inspiring images.
4. It’s Saturday afternoon and you need to figure out where to go for dinner. When you check your bookmarks on Yelp, all of the restaurants that you had saved to try have either gone out of business, you’ve already tried them and they suck, or duh, you go there all the time. Pruning your list now could make for faster decision-making later.
5. You know that guy you follow on Instagram that only takes photos of his cat dressed in a homemade Star Trek suit “playing” Xbox? Delete him. On second thought, that would be awesome. If this actually exists, please tell me. If you’re going to use this idea, you’re welcome.
6. Now for the hard part. You follow one million blogs. You can only read about 500,000. It’s time for the tough choices. Open up Feedly, or your reader of choice and take a look at your sources. Which of them can you absolutely not live without? Okay, they’re safe. Are there any that you have outgrown? Have you moved on to other interests and find some of them irrelevant? Have you become annoyed by the writer? Are you following some of them out of guilt? I know it hurts, trust me, but it’s time to let them go. One thing I love about Feedly is that you can categorize your blogs into whatever sections you want. If you just want to read design blogs, just click on your design category, etc. Try it!
Now it’s time for me to take my own advice and make my online life a little bit neater. Do you have other interwebs organizing tips for me?