Digital Spring Cleaning Part 1: Things 3

It’s easy when using digital tools to end up with a lot of extra stuff lying around. It’s necessary to sort through the digital clutter from time to time. The start of Spring seemed a good time to do this.

First up is my task manager, Things 3.

I began by evaluating my Areas, or top level lists. I’ve been feeling they're a bit too granular. I figured out which Areas had only a few tasks in them and combined them with others. This got me from 9 Areas down to 6.

Next I went through my remaining Areas and Projects pruning all the old, stale tasks I could find. These tasks were most likely never to get done, so there's not much use in keeping them. If I ever feel I need to do them in the future I can always add them back in.

Along with deleting unneeded tasks, I wanted to revise how I was doing my weekly task list. Up until now I’ve been using the Anytime list for things I want to get done in the current week. This was fine until I began using Things for content management and my book reading list. The books I want to read end up in my Anytime list, as well as my article ideas.

I decided to create a "This Week" tag to apply to anything I want to get done this week rather than use the Anytime list (a much more proper labeling system anyway).

I tried not to be too precious about anything, but even after all the purging, I no doubt still ended up with way too much. But it’s at least a little cleaner than it was before.

Do you do a regular cleaning of your digital productivity tools? Let me know in the comments below.