DETROIT – When you think about removing some of the clutter from your life, your first thoughts might be about your closets, your junk drawers or the paper piling up on your desk.
But what about what's on your phone, tablet or computer? Digital clutter is real and can be overwhelming, too.
"Your phone's all messed up with a whole bunch of apps," Julie Wells, of Birmingham, said. "When your phone says you have 3,000 emails that are unread."
"You've either got it through your iPad, your phone, your computer and it's just bombarding you," Miho Suzuki, of Birmingham, said.
"They hoard it. They don't want to get rid of a lot of the stuff. They feel like they're going to need it at some point in the future so they tend to just let it build up," Jimmy Ansara, general manager at Team TriNet, said.
Ansara knows all about getting control of your digital clutter.
"I see it all the time with many of my clients ranging from different businesses everybody holds onto data storage is one of the biggest things," Ansara said. "We're constantly either upgrading or working with employees to clear, you know, like, hey, you gotta delete some mess. Data, emails, whatever it is."
One tip Ansara has is: If you have emails that you want to go back to reference, put them in a certain folder and delete the ones you don't need.
Ansara said the best thing to do with photos is an online storage service, such as One Drive or Apple Storage in the cloud.
"You would back up all your photos to your cloud-based storage and, at that point, you can delete everything off your local machine, freeing up space and allowing you to take more photos," Ansara said.
Don't let files on your desktop get cluttered. Organize them as you would a file cabinet and discard the things you don't need.
Ansara said backing things up is key and it helps you declutter if you're moving items to a cloud or another drive.