Cleaning the digital house once a year

The house you live in grew drawers, and the drawers filled. The digital life does the same, more quietly: apps tried once and left installed, subscriptions charging since last year for a thing used twice, permissions granted in a hurry to games that wanted the microphone, a gallery of nine thousand photographs among which live perhaps three hundred that matter. Nothing collapses. It only gets heavier, and slower, and full of doors you forgot you owned. Once a year, open the drawers. Pick a date with a handle — your birthday week works — and sweep.

The apps first: delete, do not merely tidy the icons. An unused app is a door left unlocked and a small tenant eating your data with updates — you learned the difference between installing and keeping a long time ago. Then the subscriptions, because they are the leaky roof of this house: the phone keeps the list — settings, subscriptions — every monthly charge since the week you forgot. Read it once a year and cut with joy. Two thousand naira a month, unnoticed, is a bag of rice over a year.

Permissions, accounts, the gallery

Permissions next, walking the list the permissions lesson taught: the torch that wanted your contacts, the game that wanted the microphone — revoke without ceremony; the phone will not sulk, and neither will the torch. Then old accounts: the shop you bought from once, the forum from years ago. Sign out where the settings offer it, close what can be closed, and for the rest, change the password to something from the notebook — an old account on an old key is a window that floats open on its own.

The gallery last, and always in this order: backup first — the cloud lesson, the papers lesson, photographs being the papers of the heart — then delete with both hands. The screenshots of last year's transfers, the seventeen blurred versions of the same moment, the bundles from group chats. Downloads too: the mat, emptied the way lesson forty-eight emptied it. Then the storage bar, which is the house's own report card, and the empty Bin, which is the last drawer. Back up, then sweep. Never the reverse.

• One date a year: apps deleted, subscriptions read and cut, permissions revoked, accounts re-keyed.
• Backup before any deleting. The Bin has a bottom; do not test it with the only copy of anything.
• Old accounts: signed out, closed, or given a new key from the notebook.
• When the sweep ends, note the free space and the fewer doors. Next year's sweep starts from there.

The lightness afterwards

People report the same two things after a clean: the phone is faster, and the mind is quieter — the slow computer lesson said a slow machine is often a full house, and the same is true of the person carrying it. The sweep takes one evening. The lightness lasts the year. And the notebook, updated during the sweep — every kept account, every new key — remains what it has always been: the key rack of the whole house, hanging by the door of the drawer.