Decluttering your online life: how to get your digital house in order and protect your data from AI

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Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint…

Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digital trails.

Our endless photo and video streams, bursting inboxes and unread subscriptions all feed the appetite for ever growing digital infrastructure. The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online – browsing the web or social media, streaming music or videos, or communicating – producing the equivalent of 229kg of carbon emissions, a study in Nature Communications found.

And using AI tools and chatbots to generate text, images or video consumes “orders of magnitude” more energy than traditional computing methods.

Clearing out digital clutter does more than just shrink your environmental impact – it can also provide a welcome boost to your mental health and productivity. So, why not give your devices and cloud storage a spring clean?

I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing the soul-crushing frustration of looking for lost files or photos online, or simply trying to get my IT working properly. An IDC study of 840 information workers has found the average employee wastes more than two hours each week hunting for lost files and online documents.

Libby Sadler, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University, says organising our digital files and devices not only prevents time being lost but also reduces the cognitive friction and drain that occurs when we aren’t organised.