Yet because files on the computer or endless emails don't take up physical space, it's easy to overlook them. But over time it can weigh you down, distracting you and keeping you from being productive.
Professional organizer Andrea Stout, owner of Tasteful Transitions in Findlay, said clients often bring up the issue of digital clutter.
"It creates unnecessary stress and anxiety for them," Stout said.
Stout said organizing files shouldn't be seen as a one-time thing but "creating a habit," so you are doing it regularly.
The first step is to "Get rid of things you don't need," she said. "And then you can assess what you have and start categorizing it from there."
This means creating folders both on your hard drive and on your email account, she said.
Stout, as well as several other organizers, said it's also a good idea to pay attention to mailing lists and unsubscribe to regular emails you don't read.
Stout said it's easy to search for files on a computer, in theory, but it helps to know what the file is called and to name it in a way you will remember.
"Computers are smart. They will do it for you," she said. "You just have to use the tools."
Stout works as an organizer for businesses as well as individuals, and said organizing company files is a particular challenge.
"Maybe you have one shared drive, one server," she said. "And everyone's dumping files into one place. And it turns into chaos."
Reducing that chaos means training the whole team and helping them work together, she said.
"My goal as an organizer is not to come back ... over and over and over. It's to teach you skills," she said.
Dorothy Breininger, who has been nominated for Emmy awards for her role as "Dorothy the Organizer" on the A&E TV show "Hoarders," said the show has dealt with a few of what she calls "informational hoarders."
"This is a danger zone for people," she said.
Physical clutter is obvious, she said. After all, the home only has room for so much stuff. But with digital clutter, it's easy to accumulate many, many files without it being apparent, she said.
"It's like having unlimited numbers of rooms in your home," Breininger said.
She said some of the same techniques work for digital clutter as for physical clutter, and people often have the same patterns with both. For example, if you have the habit of procrastinating organizing your physical belongings you are likely to procrastinate organizing computer files as well.
Breininger recommends organizing computer files on the "cloud," a virtual storage area that can be accessed from multiple devices.
"I live in Los Angeles where we have earthquakes and fires," she said.
When someone is on the news after a disaster, the things they wish they had gotten out of the house tend to be important financial papers such as insurance and sentimental items such as photographs. So it's these items, the things you'd want with you if disaster struck, that it is most important to save, she said.
Breininger said with virtual clutter or physical clutter, professional organizers recommend a system called TRAF. This means you have four choices with each file: Toss, Route to someone else, Act on it or File it.
She said it may help to use a system similar to what you use in filing paperwork, such as color-coding both paper and digital files.
Andrea Brundage, of Arizona, a professional organizer with Simple Organized Solutions, said that today's culture of being connected to the Internet 24/7 can be exhausting.
"Getting buried in this kind of stuff is just unhealthy," she said. "The stuff is flowing at such an incredible rate into people's lives whether it's through your inbox, your telephone ... (or) text messages."
And, while computers are in theory "supposed to be eliminating paper," digital clutter can lead to more physical clutter as people print out emails and other files.
She puts it this way when she is working with a client who has 1,000 unread emails in his or her inbox: "Do you realize how much this pulls you out of balance?"
Alaia Williams, a professional organizer with One Organized Business in Los Angeles, said that when she started as an organizer people would ask how to organize their photo albums. Today, it's how to create a system for their digital photos.
Sometimes, Williams said, clients want to use their computer to organize paper clutter. They may have "a sea of Post-it notes" or business cards and want to organize this information digitally, she said. Contact information, such as doctor's office numbers and important family contacts, can be easily organized online, she said.
Williams said people inclined to be "electronic hoarders" can create an "archive" folder of items they want to keep but don't need to access any time soon.
Eileen Roth, a Scottsdale, Ariz. professional organizer and speaker and author of "Organizing for Dummies," said having a cluttered hard drive or inbox can create stress.
"You're just losing time, and once time's gone, it's gone," she said.
Roth starts by recommending that clients clear off their desktop so only programs are on the desktop, not documents.
Roth recommends having a separate email account for things like newsletters and mailing lists. Organizing your calendar on your computer also helps, she said.
There may be programs that come automatically with your computer for free, but that doesn't mean that you need to keep them, she said.
"They're hogging your desktop space," she said.
Roth also recommends not keeping your email open at all times because it will distract you from other things on your computer, creating "clutter for your mind."
Jennifer Zwiebel, a professional organizer with A Place of Joy in New York City, said part of handling your clutter involves looking at why you are hanging on to a particular piece of information. Understand why and it's easier to do something about it, she said.
For example, Zwiebel had one client who was using her email inbox as a to-do list. She would intend to get back to an email someone had sent but the emails would pile up, not unlike a pile of papers piling up on a person's desk, Zwiebel said.
"Digital clutter basically mirrors physical clutter," she said.
In this client's case, the solution was a white board so she could see her to-do list.
Andrew Schrage, co-owner of Money Crashers Personal Finance, said organizing can save you money as well as time.
Schrage said his site, geared toward personal finance, also often touches upon organization and technology from a business perspective. And Money Crashers' staff writers organize their own files through the cloud, he said.
Schrage said it's good to hang on to electronic financial documents such as taxes and bank statements and electronic receipts, but they should be organized into folders.
Being organized is directly related to personal finance, not only because it's important to save your financial records but because "it saves time, which effectively is money," he said.
Exactly how to organize will depend on the person, Schrage said.
"Try to have some kind of system that works for you," he said. "I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach."
Chuck Davis, professor of ethical hacking and computer forensics at Harrisburg University, said organizing your digital life is not only "good housekeeping" but keeps your computer more secure. Davis, co-author of two books on the subject of security, is a senior security architect at a Fortune 500 Company and previously worked as a security operations manager for IBM.
Davis knows people who once a year reinstall their operating system altogether. This makes the computer run a great deal faster but is extreme, he said.
But there are tools available that will, for example, go through your applications and web browser and look for files that have collected over time that you may not need "like your download history, your Internet cache, that type of stuff."He said if you log onto a website and it asks for your username and password, that site usually will "remember" that you have logged into that account, using files known as cookies which establish your identity. But it's possible for someone with ill intentions to capture your session cookie over unencrypted wireless connections, allowing them to pose as you even without knowing your password, Davis said. He said clearing out those cookies regularly reduces this risk.
Davis also recommends keeping a separate drive for digital media such as movies, digital photos and music.
And, he said, it's important to back up. There are many cloud-based ways to do so, one of which he has used for a few years now. He said this is encrypted so the data is secure, but it can be accessed from anywhere where there is an available connection to the Internet.
"It has saved me on two occasions," he said.
He said a good rule is to have three copies of anything you don't want to lose, on two different types of media, at least one of them off-site. Off-site storage can include cloud storage or a drive kept somewhere away from your home in case of fire.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Breininger, Brundage, Roth, Zweibel, Williams, Schrage and Davis were all contacted by phone, and Rizzo by email). Arthurs: 419-427-8494 Send an e-mail to Sara Arthurs
Thanks to Dorothy from Hoarder's for this article link!
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