source

Social media.  We all love it.  Many of us are consumed by it.  As part of my 4 words for 2014, I decided to “clean” up my social media.

Facebook – For me, this is the best way to stay up to date on what is happening with friends & family.  I love the pictures from vacations and the funny stories about my friend’s kids.  Things got out of hand when everyone was friending any person that they had ever had contact with in their life.  Get rid of people that drive you crazy.  My guidelines for cleaning out my friend list were simple – if I saw you today, would I come over and say hi?  No?  Then, we probably don’t need to be friends on the internet.  The book will always be my first internet love and when things like the picture below show up on my newsfeed, I fall in love again.

Twitter – I love finding new people to follow on Twitter, so I’m always quick to add people.  The problem was that I never unfollowed anyone.  Sorry, but I get super annoyed when all you tweet about is giveaways. I need some substance to stick around.  When you’re following too many people, you don’t see the gems that twitter throws your way sometimes.  It was time to clean up that list a little bit, so I unfollowed the people that I’ve never seen a tweet from and the people that I didn’t recognize at all.

source

Pinterest – I finally organized my boards better and deleted some duplicates and things that were cluttering up my fake online life.  That’s the extent of my “clean up” because I’m not unfollowing anyone.  I love spending hours on this website.

Gmail – UNSUBSCRIBE.  Do it now and do it again next week and every time you get something you don’t read.  I had a serious email problem and I was so worried that if I unsubscribed from something, I might miss the best sale in the entire world.  But, I did it cold turkey.  I unsubscribed from everything.  It feels amazing.  It felt even better when I didn’t miss the 2 for $22 candle sale this weekend (thanks Twitter.)

source

I’ve also learned what life is like with Buffer, IFTTT and dropbox.  If you don’t use those, go make that happen right now.

Last, but not least, I cleaned up my blog.  I got organized.  I spent much of my lazy Saturday changing the way this all looks.  I might have broken a few things, but I learned a lot.  I understand now why we pay people to design for us, but I did it and I’m happy with how it turned out.

What tips do you have for keeping your internet life clean?  Do you feel like your email owns you?