How to Kon Mari Your Digital Workspace
Organizing your workspace can help boost productivity, and make working more efficient.
Our digital lives are in a mess. The urge to save every bit of data we receive means that the average person is hoarding a heap of information they don’t need. Just as physical clutter can affect our mood and concentration, digital clutter may also impact our productivity and feel overwhelming. Fun fact: the average American has 1,602 unread emails in their inbox. If this sounds like you, it’s time for a digital clean-up.
What is Kon Mari?
Kon Mari is the decluttering method used by Japanese organizational consultant Marie Kondo. Her book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ was published in 2011, and she catapulted to fame in 2019 when Netflix ran the series ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’.
The Kon Mari method is easy to follow – Kondo’s strategy is to categorize all your household belongings, for example, clothes, books, papers, and sentimental items. These should be tackled one group at a time, instead of following the traditional approach to decluttering room by room.
She urges every declutterer to first commit to tidying up and imagining your ideal lifestyle. Next, she asks you to go through each category and discard anything you don’t need or that doesn’t ‘spark joy’. Before trashing these items, Kondo encourages you to thank each item for serving its purpose and then move on.
The final stage is to tidy away the reduced pile of items using various Kon Mari tricks, including Kondo’s folding technique.
Adapting Kon Mari to digital tidying
So, imagine you’ve decluttered your entire home. Your office and desk look pristine, you have a houseplant and family photo sparking joy as you work, and your stationery is neatly lined up. But then you open your laptop, and your desktop is a digital disaster.
How can you use Kon Mari to supercharge your online organization too?
It’s important to realize you can’t follow the traditional Kon Mari method to the letter for a successful digital clean-up - it does need to be adapted. There might be many important client documents or contracts that don’t necessarily spark joy, but you shouldn’t delete them!
Instead, the digital Kon Mari approach keeps what’s valuable for work and separates what sparks joy in your personal life. You can then arrange everything into a calm and streamlined system making it easy to locate essential documents while ensuring a clear boundary between your work and home life.
You should work in categories to declutter your apps, inbox, desktop storage, notifications, and photo storage.
Apps
Our phone is essential for both work and home life, but all too often, we find ourselves checking work apps on our phone after we’ve clocked off for the day.
Start your decluttering by going through your phone apps – these may occupy several screens on your phone. Begin by deleting any apps you no longer need or that don’t spark joy. The remaining apps can be organized into relevant folders – for example:
Work apps
Fitness apps
Messaging apps
Family apps
Productivity apps
Top tip: apps you use multiple times a day can be kept on your home screen for convenience.
Inbox
Bulging mailbox? You need a system to store the messages you need to refer back to and flag those needing your attention right now. Start by deleting all the ‘junk’ mails in your inbox and get into the habit of unsubscribing from any newsletters you’re not interested in. Even if you have a few thousand messages to sort, it shouldn’t take long to get through a few hundred, so tackle them a chunk at a time.
Create folders by departments such as Accounting and HR or by client name and start relocating those essential messages. If you have any messages that spark joy, such as receiving outstanding feedback from a boss or customer, then create a folder for these feel-good emails too.
Once you have successfully deleted or archived your messages, you can introduce a system to deal with incoming mail.
Top tip: increase your productivity by setting aside two or three times a day to check and respond to your emails so new messages don’t interrupt your workflow as they arrive.
Desktop storage
If your desktop is littered with random documents, screenshots, and PDF and jpeg files, it will feel overwhelming if you need to locate something important in a hurry.
To begin organizing, create a simple folder called ‘Important Documents’ and move anything you need to keep into here. You can delete outdated or irrelevant data, but always consult your company’s data retention policy if you need to keep specific files for compliance.
Once you have your important documents, arrange them into logical folders using a hierarchical structure. You can also do this for your Google Drive, Dropbox, and any other form of cloud storage you use.
Your clean and pristine desktop will only have shortcuts to the folders and apps you use every day.
Top tip: choose a desktop image and screensaver that ‘sparks joy’ such as a picturesque landscape or an inspirational quote.
Notifications
Do you spend your working day disrupted by pinging messages or project update notifications in your shared folders? Ask yourself if these alerts are useful and serve a purpose or cause you stress. If you use Slack, Teams, or similar, you can control and minimize notifications, removing those you don’t need.
Also, think about the notifications you receive on your phone about work-related matters during your personal time? You might choose to mute your WhatsApp groups and hide your work email, so it’s not noticeable from your home screen.
Top tip: you can also set Downtime by going through the Screen Time setting on your iPhone to prevent notifications from bothering you during scheduled hours.
Photos
Next, take a look at your photos. Your main focus here should be on keeping the images that spark joy and removing similar photos. Move the best photos into cloud storage, print them off, or export them to an external hard drive for safekeeping.
Top tip: an easy way to cut down photos if you have an iPhone is to go into the screenshots folder and delete these images in one hit.
Staying on top of your digital organization
Remember the Kon Mari approach to tidying isn’t a set it and forget it strategy. Once you’ve created a clutter-free digital workspace, it should be straightforward to stay organized. But it’s also just as easy to let the mess build back up.
Stay focused on using Marie Kondo’s tried and tested techniques to bring order to your digital space and you’ll find that it begins to spark joy throughout your working day.
Rebecca Noori is a full-time freelance writer covering topics related to productivity, careers, and HR. She’s also a contributing author at FreelancerFAQs.com where she provides actionable tips for fellow writers. Connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn.