Declutter Your Digital Files

If you love to declutter or you really need some help to declutter your digital files this guide is for you!

Around April every year, my teacher brain starts getting antsy. When there is less planning to think about, I can’t ignore all of the digital files I’ve collected throughout the year – copies of copies of documents from professional development; graphic organizers I saw online, saved, and never used; and ideas I started working on but never finished. I’m a big fan of Marie Kondo, and when I started teaching I decided I should apply her methods to my classroom too! There’s nothing better than looking at a tidy and clutter- free Google Drive ( in my opinion),but it can be overwhelming if your main drive has been accumulating clutter all year long. Let me show you how you can declutter your digital files too!

For each file, I answer a series of questions to determine whether I TRULY need to keep it. If not, into the recycle bin it goes. I hope you can use these questions to guide you on your own decluttering journey!

Category 1 of decluttering your digital files
1. Do you love the resource? Do you want to use it again?

If the answer is yes, keep it! If the answer is no, delete it! — For project sheets and graphic organizers, if I don’t LOVE it, it’s a duplicate, or I didn’t use it this year ( and likely won’t) I DELETE it.

DELETE extra pdfs of texts you don’t need or whose formatting doesn’t look polished.

DELETE meeting notes, administrative documents, and other documents you no longer need.

But, what if I need those files again?

What if I need to take a sick day, and this is the perfect thing? What if I teach this again in 2 or 3 years? What if I cause Future Me a panic attack because Present Me deleted this file?

I have these thoughts too, but here’s some real talk: After around a decade of dutifully decluttering my digital files, I can honestly say that I have NEVER ONCE regretted deleting something. Why?

If you never used it before, what makes you think you’ll use it in the future?
Almost everything is Google-able. If you found it on the internet 3 years ago for free, I bet you’ll find it again if you ever need it ( or you’ll find a more up to date version).
Pedagogy is constantly evolving. The reason we are always tweaking and perfecting our materials is not because they weren’t good before, but because we have grown as educators in training and experience over the years. Odds are, by the time you’re ready to finally dust something off and use it, your teaching practice will have evolved and you’ll want something completely different. Having just the bare necessities for gives you the structure you may need for planning down the road, but you’ll be able to create a unit that reflects the needs of the new students you’ll be teaching at that time, rather than just reusing old things that might not work as well as they once did ( or something you cobbled together once upon a time a few minutes before class started).

It may take you a couple of hours to declutter your teacher files, but I promise you that it will be time well spent. Purging and decluttering, in my mind, is a form of self-care. When you’re ready to return to your digital files in preparation for the new school year, not only will everything be easier to find, but every single file you have will be of value to you.

After you’ve decluttered your digital files, tell me how it feels in the comments! Be sure to also check out my posts on how to organize your google drive!

Happy Spring Cleaning!