On Saturday, I found myself at my phone store trading in my old iPhone 4 for an iPhone 5.
As we prepared to wipe the old one and gear up the new one, the tech Jason reminded me that I would have to connect to iTunes to download my apps again. As I played with the new phone as he did paperwork – which isn’t really paperwork when it’s on an iPad, I said, “Oh, I have to mark my favorites again in my contacts. Or do I? I may want to change who my favorites are.”
Jason laughed. “Yeah, you may want to change up things. After all, it’s your digital life.”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” I replied, my head spinning with possibilities.
It is my digital life. We all have one.
Our digital lives are filled with work and personal email, photos, documents, clouds, social media music, movies and everything else we have floating out there on the Internet. There are now legal questions on who owns your digital content after you die.
Managing our digital lives has become so important that my organizing colleague and friend Allison Carter renamed her business Digital Life Organizing. (Check out her Pinterest board too.)
Later that night, I reloaded my apps, but I was much more deliberate about it. I have lots of apps since I play with many of them for both organizing clients and web posts to see which ones work better.
Although I always delete the duds, others that I have wound up not using were still floating around.
Apps are just like anything else you have in your life. You have to decide what to keep and what to ditch. I downloaded only the apps I use and ones my clients like so I can do show and tell. The rest remain floating out there in case I need them. My personal faves that I use frequently on my phone:
- Dropbox.
- Evernote.
- Box – since we will use this at work soon.
- Wunderlist.
- Playlists on iTunes for my workouts.
- Hootsuite.
I organized the rest of my apps into categories such as Food, Social Media, Shopping, Travel, Health, Entertainment and Utilities. Putting my apps into folders works out great since I can easily find what I’m looking for. I don’t always use the default folder name if it doesn’t work for me.
Photos on my iPhone and tablet are regularly backed up to Dropbox so I don’t have to worry about what happens to them. Once they’re in Dropbox, I can rename, move and edit them.
Managing your smartphone is just a drop in the bucket of your digital life, but it’s yours to manage.
