23/52: a year of little resolutions

Ok, now that the wedding is over I am getting back into my little resolutions. One of my last goals was to clean up my computer which I really feel like I finished up with this past week. I get way too much email and a lot of it is junk mail, which is the worst.

Here are some tips to keep your computer life happy and un-cluttered:

1. You must unsubscribe to any emails that you delete immediately before opening! Clearly you're not interested in those LinkedIn update emails if you keep deleting them.

2. Evaluate which newsletters you get and which ones you actually benefit from reading. The ones you love keep, the ones you don't hit unsubcribe. Simple, right? I can't tell you how amazing it felt to unsubscribe to dozens of newsletters and now I don't even miss them. 

3. If you're like me you subscribe to a lot of blogs. Consider using Bloglovin' which is a great way to keep track of them all. You can subscribe to get emails when each blogger posts, or once a day, or once a week. I used to get them every time a blogger made a new post but it was a little chaotic so I've since changed that so I receive an email once a day with links to all the new posts. So convenient! {Also you can follow me on there too!}

4. Gmail is amazing and I LOVE their email platform. I love seeing emails in threads; Yahoo doesn't do this and it drives me insane when I reply to an email and see that the person wrote me an email 5 minutes later with something else. I'd rather see it all together in the same thread. Also create folders in Gmail. Mine now include: Blogs, Facebook, Pinterest, Recipes, Twitter and Work- to name a few. Filtering emails so that they go immediately into these folders saves me lots of time and effort. To do that click on the box next to the email, then click More Actions and then Filter Messages Like These. That will bring you to other screens where you can click Skip the Inbox (Archive It) and Apply the Label____. And then Create Filter! Ta Da! So easy and you'll thank me! Any Facebook or Twitter notifications go into their designated folder and I can read them there and then delete. It's just a way of keeping your inbox less cluttered. 

5. My last little tip is definitely the most important. Remember to back up your photos and files onto an external hard drive. I cannot tell you how sad it is to lose years and years of photos because of a computer crash. Been there and cried. Backing files up insures that you'll have them in a safe place. I got my external at Costco and it was pretty affordable. I try to back up every 6 months- although I should probably do it every 3. 

I hope these tips were a little helpful! Do you have any tips of your own? I'd love to hear!

For this next week I am going to try to be more on top of my dinners. A couple times last week I was at a loss as to what to cook and running to the store every couple days for other ingredients. I'd love to get some menus together so that I know what I'm making at least a couple hours ahead of time. Wish me luck friends!

xox