51: 4 Ways to Declutter in February – An Experiment for ADHD Brains – Part 1 – Little by Little

Little by Little: Decluttering Your Phone

This kicks off a month of quick decluttering experiments, different techniques worth trying, each simple enough to test on its own. First up is an approach I call little by little.

How it works

Set a timer for ten to fifteen minutes, no more than twenty, and use that window to declutter a little each day. If you miss a day, simply double up the next time rather than trying to catch up all at once. The where is entirely up to you, but your phone is a great place to start, since it’s often just as cluttered as any physical space in your home, overflowing with old text threads, promotional emails, and thousands of near-duplicate photos, quietly costing you storage space and sometimes even extra money once you hit a cloud storage limit.

Text strings

Scroll to the very bottom of your text threads and work your way through them. If you come across someone you’ve been meaning to reconnect with, send a quick message before deleting the thread, turning tidying into a small moment of connection. If a thread is full of photos you’re worried about losing, most phones let you save the images to your photo library before deleting the conversation, worth a quick search if you’re not sure how on your device. If a thread is just a saved phone number from a service provider you never got around to adding as a contact, take the moment to do it now, using whatever naming convention actually helps you remember them, even if that’s just a first name and their job. Group texts loaded with GIFs and images tend to be especially heavy on storage, deleting a few of these can free up a surprising amount of space.

Emails

Promotional emails are an easy target. Search for a specific sender, unsubscribe, then select and delete every message from them at once rather than picking through individually. It sometimes takes hitting unsubscribe more than once for it to actually stick, but each attempt is still progress.

Photos

Look for the batches of nearly identical shots, dozens of photos from the same moment, along with blurry or unusable ones. If you wouldn’t keep it as a printed photo, there’s no reason to keep it digitally either. Clearing these out makes everything else easier to actually look through later.

Measuring your progress

Before you start, take a quick screenshot or note of where things stand, how many unread emails, how many active text threads. At the end of the month, compare it to where you land. Watching that number drop, even gradually, ten minutes at a time, tends to feel surprisingly rewarding.

Your practical, actionable step

Set a ten-minute timer today and start on one category, text threads, promotional emails, or duplicate photos, on your phone. Take a quick note of where things stand right now so you have something to compare against later.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.