Spring cleaning is upon us, that annual process of winnowing out the stuff that's accumulated over winter -- up to and sometimes including the odd holiday gift. It's gearing up for washing windows, vacuuming behind the fridge, repotting the houseplants and flipping the mattresses.
Or, yes, just thinking about doing all those things and settling for accomplishing half of them. But that counts, too.
What also counts is doing something about an accumulation of stuff that I don't associate with spring cleaning, but is just as crucial to an organized and efficient life: Cleaning my electronic household.
I'm talking about clearing out old e-mails, taking a hard look at the Favorites queue, going over the address book for everything from duplications to death.
How many pages have I "liked" on Facebook, only to never click on them again? Although I imagine that "unliking" is not a particularly social attribute of social media. I'll file that under the category "no harm in leaving well enough alone."
Better to cull the photos that should never have been posted. Along the same lines, it's time to finally upload those photos that have been languishing in the camera, despite every promise to share them with others.
As I type this, I realize that I have a folder filled with the photos that have run with each Homegirls blog post. I should clean them out -- not because I'm running out of cyberspace, but because it's simply more efficient to dispose of what I no longer need.
Just as we doublecheck the window locks, we should check out security and privacy settings. If you're like me, I need to consolidate the scraps of paper with the various log-ons and passwords for what now constitutes my life, variously stashed in a desk cubby, a billfold pocket or simply slipped under the keyboard.
