Spring cleaning: Declutter your digital life

TAMPA (FOX 13) - If you want to get a jump start on spring cleaning, how about organizing something other than your house?

There’s no denying that a buildup of emails can slow you down.

Security expert and CEO Soaring Eagle Technologies, Jeff Garbus says too many emails can make you disorganized and it can also slow your phone or laptop.

He gave us some tips to turn your crowded inbox into a streamlined to-do list.

"Even IT professionals… have 13,000 unread messages and I’ll say, ‘You do realize this lives in real memory and that's why your computer is slow?’” Garbus told FOX 13 News.

He says instead of letting junk mail and messages pile up in the order they’re received, we should use filters and rules to categorize messages.

Popular email providers let you set rules that send certain emails to select folders.

Garbus demonstrated how to create folders and organize emails using Outlook.

Google offers similar filter options - sorting emails into social, promotions, or primary.

If your inbox is so jammed you miss important emails, plug-ins like Boomerang, Activelist, and Todoist are designed to turn your messages into tasks you can prioritize.

You can convert emails into lists that you can group and check off - until you reach your goals for the day or week.

Garbus also suggests occasionally deleting your browsing history and temporary files, which can build up on bog you down.

The biggest memory-suck is probably all your pictures and videos. Garbus says to make sure you're offloading to a hard drive and the cloud instead of storing them on your personal device.

"We all have hundreds of pictures on our phones and a few that are special, which I email to myself on my laptop, which I have backed up," Garbus explained.

And don't leave multimedia text and email messages sitting on your phone - it's just using up more space.

Save what you want - and delete the rest.

You wouldn't let real mail pile up, so don't let your email.