How to Organise Your Digital Life

I have a phone.
I have many apps.
I have 500 photos.
I want to delete old photos.
I want a tidy phone.

My digital spring cleaning list

1. Delete apps I don't use (at least 10).
2. Delete 200 old photos.
3. Make a folder for school files.
4. Unsubscribe from 5 newsletters.
5. Change my password for the bank app.
6. Check my screen time on Sunday.
7. Turn off notifications on Instagram.
8. Back up my important photos to the cloud.

Dear Mum,

I was thinking about our conversation on Sunday, when you said you could never find anything on your phone and felt like it was 'fighting you'. I don't think it's just you — most of us feel the same way — but I wanted to share a few things that have helped me, in case any of them might help you too.

First, your home screen has too many apps. When you pick up your phone, you see about forty things and have to look for what you actually want. Could we sit down together and move everything except the ones you use every day (Messages, Phone, WhatsApp, your banking app, Maps, the camera) to a second screen? The first screen would be simpler, and you would find things faster.

Second, your photos. You have over 10,000 of them, and you can't find the one of the kids at the lake last summer. The problem isn't the quantity — it's that there are no folders. Could we spend one Saturday morning making a few simple albums ('Family', 'Holidays', 'Garden')? After that, when you take a photo that matters, you can drop it into the right album in five seconds.

Third, passwords. I know the little notebook in the kitchen drawer is 'your system', but it means you can only sign in when you are at home, and if you lose the notebook, you lose everything. There is a free app called Bitwarden that would keep all your passwords safe, and you would only need to remember one.

You don't have to do any of this. But if any of it sounds useful, I'll come over on a Saturday morning and help. No pressure.

With love,
Sophie

The hidden costs of my digital life.

I counted, recently, the number of email newsletters I had signed up for at some point in the last five years. It came to eighty-three. I had deliberately subscribed, in each case, to receive the emails. I had, in fact, read perhaps three of them with any regularity. The other eighty had been arriving in my inbox for years — some weekly, some monthly — and I had been deleting them as they came, or letting them pile up unread, or glancing at the subject line and moving on. This is a small, ridiculous fact about my life, and it is also, I now think, a kind of symbol.

The cost of those eighty newsletters was not the time it took to delete them. It was the background texture they created — the sense of always having 'things to get to', the low-grade guilt of unread items, the small fraction of a second each email stole from my morning as I processed and rejected it. None of these costs were big enough to notice in isolation. Together, they formed a persistent small friction against everything I was actually trying to do.

When I unsubscribed — which took, in total, about forty minutes — the immediate effect was minor. My inbox was less full. But the second-order effect was, to my surprise, more significant. I had not realised how much of my relationship to my email had been defined by triage: scanning, rejecting, deleting, ignoring. With the volume reduced, the triage function quieted, and I became capable of actually reading the emails that remained — properly reading them, responding to some, thinking about them. The same amount of time at my desk produced, suddenly, a qualitatively different kind of attention.

I do not want to overstate what is after all only an inbox. But the experience suggested something to me about the general shape of digital life — that much of what I was treating as use was actually triage, and the triage itself was using up the capacity I would otherwise have used for actual use. Every digital thing I had accepted had quietly been asking for a small portion of my daily attention, and eighty-three tiny requests, collectively, had been taking a toll I had never counted.

There is probably a moral in this, but I am hesitant to reach for it too quickly. Perhaps: digital things are easy to acquire and hard to weigh, and so they accumulate past the point where we would choose them if we saw them all at once. Perhaps: the real cost of a habit is sometimes not the habit itself but the constant mild management of its absence of benefit. Either way, I have unsubscribed. I will see, over the coming months, whether anything else changes.

What organisation does not solve.

I went through a period, a few years ago, of being exceptionally well-organised digitally. I had a folder system I was proud of, a system of tagged notes, an inbox that reached zero at the end of most weeks, a collection of automations that moved things around for me without my intervention, and a kind of satisfaction in all of it that I have since become a little embarrassed about. The satisfaction was not, I now think, really about the work that the organisation was supporting. It was about the organisation itself. I was polishing the tools at the expense of using them.

What began to bother me, eventually, was a small but persistent observation. On weeks when everything was beautifully in place, I was no more productive than on weeks when it was not. I was, if anything, less so, because a portion of the week that could have been spent writing or thinking had been spent, instead, refining the system in which I was meant to be writing and thinking. The systems had become a substitute for the work they were supposed to enable. It took me an uncomfortably long time to recognise this, because the organisation felt so like progress that it was hard to see it clearly.

I do not think this is a purely personal confession. The general form of the mistake — optimising the container at the expense of the contents — seems to me quite common, and to apply well beyond the digital case. I have known people who organise their weekends with such rigour that they have no weekend. I have known researchers whose literature reviews were exquisite and whose research was thin. I have known writers, including myself, who will happily spend three hours tidying a desk to avoid an hour of writing at it. The pattern is so familiar that we have a name for it; we call it procrastination, and we blame ourselves, when the truer name might be: a confusion of the means with the end.

What organisation does not solve, I have come to think, is the deeper problem of whether one is doing the right work. A tidy inbox is genuinely easier to work from than a chaotic one, but the work has to exist first. The cleaning of the digital life is at its best when it is in service of something — a project, a person, a line of thinking, a conversation one wants to have. In the absence of that something, tidying becomes recreational. It scratches an itch that is not quite the one we thought we were scratching. We enjoy the sense of having gained control over a small corner of our lives, and we do not notice, quite, that we have gained control of a very small corner indeed.

I still keep my digital life reasonably in order. The old excesses have gone; the essential elements remain. What has shifted is the weight I place on all of this. I no longer expect a clean phone to make me a better writer, a calmer person, or a more careful thinker. It just makes it slightly easier to find things, which is worth something, but not very much. The harder work — the unglamorous, unrecorded, undeliverable work of actually thinking about something and doing it — cannot be organised into place. It has to be undertaken. The organisation will not ever do it for me, and I now suspect it was never going to, even on my best week.

What my device remembers that I do not.

There is a folder, on my phone, that the photograph application has generated for me without my involvement, which contains all the photographs I have ever taken of a particular person. The person is my mother. The folder goes back, it tells me, to April 2014, the earliest photograph on the phone — though my mother and I were, of course, acquainted before the phone had any information on the matter. The earliest photograph shows her sitting at a kitchen table in a house we no longer own, wearing a shirt I do not remember, holding a cup I do not recognise, laughing at something I could not now recover from either of our memories and which I cannot reconstruct even with concentration. The photograph is eleven years old. Eleven years is, for a mother and a daughter who live in the same city, not a long time. And yet the evidence of the device is clear: it can see things I cannot.

I have started, recently, to find this minor fact more arresting than I would have expected to. The photograph is not doing any special labour. It is an ordinary photograph taken by a person who owned a phone at a kitchen table. But it carries, without meaning to, a small piece of information — what my mother was like on that day — that has fallen completely out of my head, and would have fallen completely out of hers, and which no ordinary memory could, I think, have kept. The device is not smarter than me. But in this small, specific respect, it remembers better. And the collective effect of twelve years of such photographs, and of the messages exchanged over those years, and of the small geographical data points that record where I was and with whom, is that the device has come to hold a fuller record of my life-with-my-mother than either of the two humans in the relationship retain in their heads.

It is tempting, here, to reach for a grand reflection about memory and modernity. I want to resist the temptation. The situation is stranger than a grand reflection can capture, and also smaller. Human memory has always relied on external storage. The photograph is not the first document my mother and I have shared; letters predated it, and before letters, presumably, the shared recollection of the rest of the family, and before that, whatever stories we told each other about earlier versions of ourselves. Some of this was always on paper, and some of it was always on other people. The phone is, in this sense, not the origin of the problem but its most recent expression.

What feels new, to me, is the thoroughness. Earlier storage was spotty, selective, and asked something of the person who consulted it. One remembered what one cared about; the letter one had kept was the letter that had mattered; the story one told about the past shaped the past into a coherent narrative. The phone, by contrast, keeps everything. It does not discriminate. It has no idea which of the eleven thousand photographs in its care carries weight and which is a blurry accident. In handing over memory to this particular delegate, I have handed over not just the storage of experience but the act of selection, which turns out to have been a significant part of what remembering was for. The device has a more complete record than I do, and in some small but real way, I have fewer meanings.

I do not know what to make of this, quite. The photographs remain, and so do I, and in some quiet way my mother and I both know the other is more fully remembered, and a little less fully known, because of the machine on the table between us. I do not wish to be dramatic about this, because the drama is always available and is usually wrong. But I want to note the small new fact of it, which is that some of what memory used to do is now done, mostly well and partly imperfectly, by a corporation in Cupertino whose interests in the matter are not entirely ours. This is a minor strangeness, probably. But it is the strangeness we live in.