Digital Declutter: Why your virtual spring clean matters more than ever

The average office in the 1990s was drowning in paper – filing cabinets lined walls, folders full of documents, and printers humming.

Today, we’ve simply shifted this clutter to the cloud. But while it might be out of sight, our digital hoarding has very real environmental consequences.

The hidden cost of digital clutter

Demand from commercial data centres will increase six-fold, just in the next ten years

John Pettigrew, Group CEO National Grid, 2024

Every email we keep, every duplicate photo we store, and every outdated document we hang onto contributes to this growing energy appetite. While a single email might seem insignificant, multiply that by millions of users keeping decades of digital correspondence, and the carbon footprint of emails becomes substantial.

Your Digital Declutter checklist

1. Email management

Question whether you need to send that email at all – could it be a quick message instead?

• Delete old promotional emails and newsletters
• Clear out your spam folder
• Unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read
• Archive important emails and delete the rest

2. Cloud storage clean-up

Start with the big three: Google Drive, Dropbox, and SharePoint.

• Remove duplicate files
• Delete old versions of documents
• Clear out incomplete downloads
• Remove old project files you’ll never reference again
• Compress large files you need to keep

3. Device declutter

How many files and apps do you actually use?

• Delete unused apps
• Clear browser cache and history
• Remove downloaded files you no longer need
• Clean up your desktop
• Delete old backups after verifying your current ones

4. Image and media management

Photos and videos are often the biggest storage hogs:

• Delete duplicate photos
• Remove blurry or unnecessary shots
• Compress high-resolution images you want to keep
• Transfer important media to a single, organized storage location
• Delete downloaded videos you can easily stream instead

5. Website

Clean up your website and review:

• Remove outdated plugins and themes
• Optimise your database
• Compress all images
• Archive old posts and pages

Making IT sustainable: creating new habits and business processes

Digital decluttering isn’t a one-time task – it’s about developing new habits and business processes:

1. Think before you save: Before saving a file to the cloud, ask yourself if you’ll genuinely need it later.
2. Regular clean-up sessions: Schedule monthly digital clean-up sessions, just as you probably do for your physical space.
3. Smart storage strategies: Organise files logically from the start to prevent digital chaos and multiple copies.
4. Mindful communication: Consider whether you need to send that email or if a quick message would suffice.
5. Share links, not attachments: If you need to send a document, embed a sharing link, so the document is not copied.

The bigger picture

While a single deleted email won’t solve climate change, collective action matters.

If every office worker deleted 30 unnecessary emails, we’d significantly reduce data centre energy consumption. These small actions, multiplied across millions of users, create a meaningful impact.

Getting started with a digital declutter

Start small – pick one area like email or photos and spend 30 minutes cleaning it up.

You’ll likely find that a digital declutter brings practical advantages beyond the environmental benefits:

• Faster devices
• Easier file finding
• Reduced storage costs.

The most sustainable byte is the one we never store.

As we move towards an increasingly digital future, managing our virtual carbon footprint will become as important as managing our physical one.

So, next time you’re about to hit “save” or “send,” pause and ask yourself: Do I really need this in my digital life?

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