Things to Spring Clean That May Have Slipped Your Mind

Right now, unless you are considered an essential employee, you probably have a lot of extra time. Most people are using this self-isolation time to get a lot of cleaning and organizing done around the house. But there are other things to spring clean that you may not of thought to do.


We all have our own things we do during spring cleaning time; cleaning out closets, donating items, going through junk drawers, and the obvious floor to ceiling and wall to wall scrub down. Those are the obvious areas that get our attention this time of year, but I always take it one step farther and disinfect my entire life. Here's some areas that are often overlooked that I like to clean out this time of year.


Email Newsletters

If anything this pandemic has shown me, it's that I signed up for so many email newsletters that I don't even read or knew I had signed up for. During this past few weeks, I have got an email from every business I've ever given my email to. I'm sure I'm not the only one. This is why right now is a great time to go through your email and unsubscribe to the newsletters from companies and websites that you just delete and forget about. This is going to declutter your inbox quite a bit. The other time of the year to do this is around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. All those emails pile up, especially during that time of year. Unsub to the ones you don't read.


Phone Contacts

This may not really be a problem for too many people, but right now is a good time to go through those phone contacts and delete any numbers that are no longer in use or numbers for people you no longer speak to. Do this especially if your phone has ever synced with your Facebook and has put all your Facebook friends into your phone's contacts.


Your Computer

I do pretty frequent virus and malware scans on my computer, but it's usually the quick scan. Spring cleaning is the time when I do a full scan in safe mode. Scanning your computer in safe mode tends to pick up a lot more things that your malware protection doesn't pick up otherwise. Malware and Spyware are tricky little buggers in that they hide pretty well. I also use this time to do a complete cleaning of my laptop. I perform maintenance checks on it, update all software, delete programs I don't use, run a disk defrag and clean-up, delete temp files and photos piling up, and clear out the bookmarks in my browsers that I just don't visit.


Social Media

This is kind of in the same line as the phone contacts. Sometimes we overlook how many pages we like or follow and how many friends we have that we never see posts from. Sit down and take the time to go through your friends list. Delete friends and family's old accounts that are no longer active and get rid of the people you just don't interact with. Go through the pages you follow and get rid of those that are also no longer active or that you just have no interest in anymore. Be careful when doing this, however. Take your time and only do a few at a time. Facebook and Instagram in particular are two sites that will place a 'ban' on you for unliking and unfollowing too many pages/profiles at one time.


Digital Photos

I try to keep my phone clean of screenshots and photos in general so they don't pile up and take up space, but sometimes I can amass quite a bit. I go through my phone's albums and delete the ones I don't need anymore. For all the ones I do want to keep, I sync them up with my Google Photos so I clear up that space on my phone. I also go through my Google Photos and delete what I no longer want or need on there as well. As a blogger and influencer, you can imagine the amount of photos I have to go through pretty regularly. Sometimes I'll remember to delete them off my phone, but completely forget to delete them from my Google Photos. Usually once they are uploaded to my site or social media, I no longer need them and they just sit there digitally taking up space.


eBooks

This doesn't usually tend to be a problem for me because I stay pretty diligent on freeing and saving space on my Kindle. However, this is me reminding you that if you have ebooks you have finished and left on your device that you don't really plan on reading again, you should delete them or digitally gift them to a friend. I am that person that will delete a book as soon as I read it if I didn't like it or don't have the desire to read it more than once. It happens a lot more than you think. Some books I read just don't really have rereadability (is that a word? It is now!). So I get rid of those as soon as I've read them to make room for new ones. That being said, I'm impulsive when it comes to downloading books. Especially if they are free! So I do go through every 6 months or so and delete the ones that no longer interest me whether I've read them or not.


Music Streaming

My streaming service of choice has always been Spotify. I have a Spotify premium account and listen to that pretty much all day, every day. I make playlists constantly, but for the most part, just keep adding new things to one particular playlist that I listen to the most. It occurred to me a few days ago that most of my playlists all have pretty much the same songs on them and a lot of songs I just don't really dig anymore because my music happy butt overplayed them. So I went through and deleted those. I cleaned up my playlists a bit, combined a bunch, and reorganized the rest. I mean, did I really need two 80's playlists? And my workout mix? I usually just listen to whatever I feel like when I workout, so there was no need for that. Clean up your playlists a bit. You'll probably still spend time hitting the "next song" button, but now you'll have less to filter through to get to that one song you really want to hear 15 times in a row.


Blog Posts

Okay so this one obviously doesn't apply to a pretty large percentage of you, but fellow bloggers and writers now is the time to go back through posts and do some analyzing. This is going to take a ton of time to do, but it's worth it and necessary. Check to make sure images have not expired and links are still working. Analyze which of your older posts (past one year old) are still getting traffic and which ones are fizzling out. Get rid of the ones that no longer bring in traffic. Make updates to older posts to freshen them up and don't be afraid to still promote old posts on your social media. I call these "In Case You Missed It" or ICYMI posts for all my newer followers that may have missed a particularly good post from years past. Just remember that it still has to be relevant, entertaining, and/or useful currently to draw in the traffic.