The Marie Kondo declutter method applied to phone apps and computers

Ditch the clutter from your computer and smartphone using organisational methods from Marie Kondo and other experts.

Marie Kondo’s “joy” test, which has decluttered countless homes, can be applied to digital appliances.

One day, when cleaning my home using Marie Kondo’s method for organising your stuff, I found myself wondering whether her techniques could apply to my digital life.

By the end of the weeks-long personal transformation that ensued, I found myself listening to a scientist who insisted you could predict someone’s personality by looking at how organised their computer desktop was.

Kondo’s bestselling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up , has spawned a global movement in which proponents declare on social media that they have “Kondo’d” their closets, kids’ bedrooms and so on. The mechanics are simple: you pile up everything you own in the middle of the floor, and one by one you hold each object and ask yourself if it sparks joy. Only once you have handled everything you own can you organise it, jettisoning what doesn’t pass the joy test. Oh, and you have to do this in a single go.

Once you’ve tried it, you know. The problem for me was, how did I apply to ephemeral digital objects a method that involved probing our emotions about a thing by touching them? On a hunch, I started with my iPhone, since it had a touch-based interface. When I touched each app and considered tapping the “x” that would delete it, I instantly knew which sparked joy. In a few minutes I had Kondo’d my phone as thoroughly as my closet. I dumped more than a dozen apps from a device whose contents I thought I had trimmed to the bone.

Emboldened by this small victory, I began consulting experts about how they organised their digital lives. The Wall Street Journal personal-technology columnist Joanna Stern told me she was “kind of a hoarder”, then sent me a list of columns she had written on how to tame every part of your digital life, including email, contacts, photos and calendars, all of which I found useful.

Per Stern’s advice, I used the service Unroll.me to unsubscribe from dozens of newsletters and promotional emails, which made all those other tabs in Gmail (promotions, updates and so on) useful again. Long ago I had switched to cloud-based services for managing my photos, music and documents, entrusting search and learning algorithms to manage these things for me. When digitally Kondo-ing, the cloud is essential.

Steve Whittaker, professor of human computer interaction at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has discovered through his research that everyone organises digital objects — files, emails, to-do items — differently, and is fiercely loyal to their own methods, even when they are shown evidence that theirs isn’t the best way.

Take email: Whittaker revealed in a 2011 study that people who filed away their emails were no better at finding them in the future than those who didn’t organise them at all and simply relied on search for retrieval. For me, this confirmed one way the digital world was forever different from the physical: online, you have to know which organisational tasks to more or less give up on. I may have unsubscribed to all those newsletters, but I don’t, it seems, need to tidy up the 4572 unread emails in my inbox.

In all other areas, however, cleaning up is key. “In the personal domain, if you want to find stuff again, it’s important that you impose organisation on it,” says Whittaker. This is in part because humans are bad at predicting how we will want to access information as our future selves.

But organisation is also a function of our personalities. In another paper, Whittaker and his colleagues discovered that neurotic people were likelier to spread files across their desktops, while conscientious people were likelier to file them away neatly. In yet-to-be-published research, Whittaker reveals that when people navigate to files in a graphic user interface, they are using an older area of their brain, evolutionarily speaking, than when they find things with desktop search, which uses the overdeveloped neocortex that distinguishes us from our ancestors.

In a blog post, journalist and filmmaker John Pavlus proposed the most radical reorganisation of a smartphone: dump all your apps into one folder and use search to navigate to the one you need. His proposal seemed crazy, but I used this method and it transformed my mobile experience. I used to let the grid of apps inform me about what to do next, but now that they are out of sight, my relationship with my smartphone feels task-oriented and driven by my own desires.

Or, as Kondo wrote, “Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.”