A place for everything, and everything in its place: the mantra of decluttering.

There has never been a better time to tackle clutter, it seems. Japanese tidying whizz Marie Kondo is enjoying great success with her Netflix series Tidying Up, in which she helps us mere mortals order our chaotic lives. Friends and family are talking about it. She has inspired some of the messiest amongst us to clean up their act.

She has achieved the seemingly impossible: she has made tidying trendy!

Now, as someone constantly seeking a system – both in my learning and my wider life – it is an exciting thing to see neatness and order back in vogue via a little Marie Kondo magic. Creating order, and finding a more productive path through that order, has been a passion of mine as long as I can remember. I am forever playing with planning tools like Evernote and Wunderlist to fulfil my own version of everything in its place, and improving my learning goals in the process.

After all, tidy place – tidy mind, true? And that can only be a good thing for living your best language learning life.

Digital decluttering : the case

The thing with clutter is that it often gathers imperceptibly, cheekily, brazenly, under your nose. Junk piles up, dust gathers, and you didn’t even notice it! And nowhere is that more apparent today than with digital junk.

And the worst culprit? Unused mobile apps.

My phone was steadily getting clogged. It’s a slow but sure process, for sure. The ease of finding and installing apps these days means you, too, have probably ended up with pages of icons you barely click on. And ever-increasing phone storage mitigates the natural ‘memory warning’ limit that might have once alerted us to our app gluttony.

The glut encompasses seemingly harmless educational apps, too. There has been an explosion in language learning platforms over the past couple of years. And, excitable linguists that we are, it is hard to resist the instant tap-install impulsion when a new language app suggestion pops up.

But we have to ask the question: how many of those scores of language apps do we really use?

Certainly, some of them are my most used apps. On iOS, you can even check that with the new Screen Time feature. True enough, Anki and Duolingo are up there in my most frequented apps.

Others, though, I haven’t opened in months. Years, almost. They’re just sitting there, gathering electronic dust on my phone.

What’s the harm, you might ask? Well, a bloated phone can cloud clarity of purpose when it comes to using it. A mass of too many apps is amorphous, disorganised. We look at the phone and are lost in a chaos of possibilities. Too much choice can be paralysing, and even interfere with good habit-building.

We can’t see the wood for the trees.

So how to tackle it?

An app a day (keeps the clutter away)

You could spend a good chunk of time going through everything, bit by bit, getting rid of the clutter in one go. But there is a much gentler way – and one that gives you time to evaluate and reassess in your own time what you really use and value in your handheld learning space. This gentle antidote involves the gradual and regular application of a little Marie Kondo Zen.

Marie famously invites followers to interrogate the connection they have to their clutter. Touch it – and see if it sparks joy. Although you can’t touch an app like a piece of clothing, you can still probe your connection to it. Open it, play with it, see if you still feel its worth to your aims and objectives in life. Each of those myriad apps – what would your life be like without it? If there’s no joy, then there’s no need to hang on to it.

Since you probably have lots and lots of apps to interrogate in this way, this could be a big task. And it’s always best to approach a big task with a method.

To that end: say hello to the Delete-An-App-A-Day challenge!

Each day, for as long as it takes for you to feel on top of your phone again, commit to deleting one app. No more, no less. If you have a cluttered tablet, do the same on that. Keep going until you get to the gold – those apps that do spark joy.

Enlightenment through decluttering

The upshot of all this is that you don’t just end up with a lighter phone. You also learn a lot about yourself and your learning preferences.

I set myself this challenge a couple of weeks ago now. My phone screens are already less busy. But there are extra bonuses along the way: rediscovering apps I’d forgotten about, rearranging the apps I want to keep so that they are harder to overlook, realising how much I can recall from language app lessons I thought were difficult the first time round. By cutting out the dead wood, I can squeeze more out of the items I decide to keep.

So what have I uninstalled? Well, I won’t name and shame here. All apps have value to someone, after all. What we connect with is deeply personal, and the apps I shun will be another language learner’s indispensable go-to.

I will say, however, that I miss none of the apps I’ve deleted so far. A sure sign that digital decluttering is the way to go!

Be honest, be ruthless, dare to delete!

Going forward

Ultimately, you will come to a point where you are left with just those apps that really work for you. There is no need to keep going. But some general house rules will help avoid future clutter.

One strategy I find helpful is a one-in-one-out code for app installations. Incidentally, this is great for applying to your clothes, too, if you want to avoid wardrobe sprawl. If you want something new, then it must take the place of something old that you want to get rid of. Of course, deleting an app needn’t be as permanent as donating clothes to a charity shop: you can always reinstall later if you made a terrible mistake.

Mobile device operating systems can lend a hand, if you are in two minds about a certain app. As mentioned above, Screen Time on iOS 12 will show you the apps you spend most time looking at. Google’s Digital Wellbeing offers similar functionality for Android. Ultimately, though, how you feel about an app should determine your final decision: chop or not?

You may also find further helpful features by digging in your phone settings, too. iOS, for example, can be set to automatically offload unused apps so that they no longer take up valuable space. The app icon remains, though, which you could argue is continued clutter. That said, offloaded apps do appear with a download arrow on your screen, so the feature is handy for flagging up apps to delete manually.

Once you have a handle on digital decluttering on your phone, you can apply it to other areas of your online world, too. Twitter is one platform that certainly benefits from a little pruning now and again. When you start, it can become a healthy addiction. After all, what area of life won’t benefit from a little Zen?

Streamline your digital life. Make your daily productivity path a little bit clearer. Take the Delete-An-App-A-Day challenge and spark your own joy!