This week it feels like Spring has finally sprung, and quite quickly – after all of the snow that appeared in Essex at the start of the month. The old cliché at this time of year is to be getting on with some Spring cleaning – but as most of us have all been at home for most of the last year, our gut feeling suggests that your house is probably in pretty decent order.
But your computer…
Maybe it’s time for us to take a look at how you can spring clean your computer. And hopefully, it shouldn’t take you much more than an hour.
This is the easiest first step to take. It is very easy when you just need to save something quickly or need to access a file regularly for it to get saved onto your desktop. Clearing your desktop is a good first step to take because saving files there can slow down your machine and make it run less efficiently.
Plus, clearing your desktop is the first visual cue that you are organising and decluttering. If your computer looks cleaner, it will feel cleaner.
A second area that doesn’t often get tidied up is your download file. With the amount of work, and life, done online these days – chances are that you probably download several files every week or probably every day.
These often go directly into a download folder on your computer and then… nothing much else. So take some time to file what needs filing and delete what needs deleting.
And on the subject of deleting what needs deleting, anything that doesn’t need to be filed and kept (obviously you’ll know what needs to stick around for your business) and hasn’t been used or looked at for over a year can go straight into the recycle bin.
The things that you do need to keep a hold of are best organised into logical folders based on workflows, and with file names that have a date on them – for ease of reference and access later.
The next step you’ll want to do is ensure that as little as possible is actually stored on your computer, in the event of loss or damage, this really is the best way to ensure that you don’t lose the really important things.
The preferred method of doing this would be to get your files onto the cloud using a tool like SharePoint – but you can also achieve this aim with an external hard drive (which can be secured for a relatively affordable price).
Finally. Step 5 – and don’t miss the one out, because once it’s done you’ll have a smug sense of satisfaction (at least until you need to clear out your computer again). Empty the recycle bin!
Obviously, if your computer is getting a lot of heavy use, then there might be things you need to do to give it a really deep clean. You can learn more about that in some of our previous articles.
If you have any specific questions we can help with, contact us here.
