Digital House Cleaning for 2012

At the end of the year, a lot of us are talking about plans for next year and how we can improve things for the next year. Part of going into any new year is the idea of a fresh start. For me, that starts as a digital house cleaning. Our offices at Engauge actually close up for a week between Christmas and the New Year, so I'm taking the week to do a few things to really start my first day back at my desk in 2012. What does a digital house cleaning look like for me?

Cleaning Up Evernote

I use Evernote as a web clipper more than anything else. I also use it for meeting notes and brainstorming ideas, whether it be for client work. However, at the end of the year, it tends to get a bit disheveled and there are a lot of folders and notes that I no longer really need. Re-organizing my notes and setting new folders up for new accounts I'm helping with in the new year will help me jump right back into a deep dive of work next week. The key will be if I can keep it that clean all year.

Archiving Old Mail

There's a lot in my email inbox that I don't necessarily need in my inbox. I always see how @cspenn talks about archiving month-old mail the first of every month. Sure, I'm a little behind but better late than never. Setting up folders for different pieces of mail that I may need (by account, personal receipts etc) and deleting junk mail that still managed to stay in my inbox. Coming back to work with a cluttered inbox will definitely kill a few hours of my day I could use to get some useful work done.

Organize Files

This doesn't just mean documents on my computer. Archiving all of our old 2011 documents and decks on my personal computer as well as cleaning up whatever I've been working on in Google Docs and re-organizing old docs in there. In 2011, I really started to neglect fully using my Dropbox account. Backing-up important files and deliverables into Dropbox going into 2012 and organizing what currently lives in there will help expedite my processes in the new year (not to mention being a great CYA file system).

Assemble More Boards on Pinterest

I've written and been interviewed a lot about Pinterest. However, about the only halfway useful thing I've done on the site was helping start The Board of Man. I observe what happens on Pinterest and how connections are made but am not as active of a participant on the site as I really should be. Mainly because I don't do a good job setting up boards. I hope to be a much better contributor to the Pinterest ecosystem as that site continues to explode in 2012.

Clean Out RSS Reader

For anyone with an RSS reader, you may be like me and subscribe to a LOT of blogs. However, there are a few streams that I tend to just glance over without really paying attention. To avoid being overwhelmed with information, I plan on removing blogs that I find myself glancing over instead of actively opening. I know that I'll discover plenty of new content to add to my RSS feed in the next year.

On the note of RSS, I'm actually organizing my Pulse reader on my new Kindle Fire (thanks @meganmarie122 for the awesome Christmas present) in categories, even including a page of just Engauge bloggers to keep up with all of my co-workers contributions. We work on so many different items, often at separate times, that reading their blogs is the best way to actively learn more from my teammates.

That's how I plan on cleaning house online for 2012. What would be on your to-do list for a digital house cleaning?