How To Organize Your Electronic and Tech Devices

In order to live a life without stress, you have to stay on top of your personal belongings. Indeed, a Financial Review article notes that your home should be a peaceful sanctuary. And if you feel overwhelmed by your stuff or find it hard to maneuver around your house, clutter might have prevailed, creating unnecessary stress.

In our digital age, we’ve also accumulated many electronic and technical devices. If you look around, how many do you see? A lot probably! With all these devices it can be a real struggle to keep everything organized.

Therefore, I’ve taken a look at how the KonMari method, a popular organization system that has taken the world by storm, can help to peacefully organize your electronic and tech devices. And make sure to check out my easy process to declutter your phone at the end of this article!

What is the KonMari Method?

The KonMari method was created by Japanese organizing consultant and best-selling author Marie Kondo. She aims to help every person achieve peace in their personal lives by providing tips on how to keep personal spaces clutter-free.

Marie Kondo’s methods have proven to be a hit, as a show centered on her organization philosophy, The Magic of Tidying Up was picked up by streaming giant Netflix. Other than the show, she has two books, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy, a manga, and a series of partnerships that wouldn’t be possible without her groundbreaking organization system.

Simply put, the KonMari method revolves around these rules:

Commit to tidying up.
Imagine your ideal lifestyle.
Finish discarding first.
Tidy by category, not by location in your house.
Follow the right order.
When deciding about an item, ask whether it sparks joy.

How to Organize Your Electronic and Tech Devices, the Marie Kondo Style

Now that you’re familiar with the basics of the KonMari method, let’s take a look at how it can help you with organizing your electronic and tech devices.

Learn How To Categorize

The KonMari method uses five key categories to divide a person’s belongings at home: clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and mementos. When organizing your electronic devices, you can use the same principle to gain a better overview of your stuff.

There are many ways to categorize your devices. For one, you can segregate your electronics depending on how often you use them. Another way to group your tech is by dividing it based on what decade it was released or how advanced its features are.

Start With Decluttering To Organize Your Electronic And Tech Devices

How many chargers can you find in your house? Exactly!

In every home, cables are the number one source of electronic clutter. The more devices we get, the more cables we accumulate as well. To start decluttering them, the first thing to do is to gather all your cables and sort them based on usage. You should take broken cables and other electronics you’d like to discard of, to your local Solid Waste Authority to get them recycled.

After that, keep the cables that you believe would be of great value in the near future, and remove any that feel obsolete or outdated.

But it’s not only cables. You probably also own a lot of old mobile phones, old televisions, CD-players and so much more electronic devices. The same decluttering method applies for these items. You can find a more in depth approach in this article How To Declutter Electronics in 10 Steps.

Don’t be a digital hoarder: declutter your phone

How many apps do you have on your phone? And how many do you actually use? I know, I have been guilty of this as well. But every few months I will check my phone and remove all the apps I don’t use anymore. Who needs another faceswap app anyway?

Another thing I recommend, is to make sure you only have the apps you often use on your home screen. Move the ones you occasionally use to another screen or place them in folders.

Declutter and organize your photo library

Next up we have our enormous photo library to declutter. Photos are taking up so much storage space on your phone. Therefore it’s important to unclutter periodically.

The first step is deleting the photos that are blurry or that are duplicates. The next step is a bit harder: throw away the photos that don’t spark joy. If you don’t want to see the specific photo in the future again, just delete it. And if you do this periodically, there is no need to have a major organizing system for your digital photo library.

Last but not least: make sure you use iCloud or Google Photos to create automatic backups in the cloud. This way you will never lose your precious memories.

Declutter and Organize Your Old Emails

With all the free email services available, we all have an enormous amount of free space to store more and more emails. That’s why keeping the inbox tidy can be quite a challenge.

These are the steps I take to periodically declutter my email inbox:

Delete the trash, social and promotional emails. When you use Gmail, they are stored in separate folders so you can find them easily.
Filter your emails by size and delete the ones that have large attachments. You probably won’t need them anymore anyway.
Now get rid of old mails by filtering out your 3-years-or-older-emails. Just delete the old ones, you won’t read them again anyway.
Check emails that look similar and search for more by subject or sender, so you can delete those emails too.

Now that your inbox is decluttered, you can start organizing emails by:

Checking your email periodically during the day. Don’t keep your mail open all day, it will only distract you from getting things done. Just schedule time to check and respond to your emails.
Answer incoming emails right away if they take less than 2 minutes to respond.
You can put the ones that need more time on your to-do list or move them to a folder and/or label them.

Does it Save Energy and Spark Joy?

Lastly, it’s also important to think about saving energy and the ease of use when decluttering and organizing your electronic devices. These days, most of your devices can be connected via a smart home hub. This is a device or mobile app that connects all your smart home devices. This way, you can control your lighting, heating, security and a lot of other appliances from your phone.

HomeServe Living notes that creating a smart home hub brings harmony to your home, as it allows your devices to work together according to your preferences. When organizing your electronic devices, it’s best to factor in how much energy it saves and if it’s smart enough to be integrated into your smart home system. If an electronic device isn’t efficient or advanced enough to join your smart hub, it can eat up your energy, raise your monthly bills, and won’t spark joy in your life.

Show Gratitude and Say Goodbye

A crucial part of the KonMari method is giving thanks to items that you choose to discard. Marie Kondo is quoted saying, “By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and your life, in order.” So by showing gratitude to devices that have once given you joy and served a purpose in your life, you’ll find it easier to keep your belongings and life organized. Now, go and organize your electronic and tech devices!