Service Spotlight: Digital Maintenance

Ah, digital organizing. Are you sick of hearing about it yet? I'm not sick of talking about it because it is such a necessary and underutilized service! Some clients ask me, "What do most people do about their emails? Their photos? Their files?" In my experience, most people don't think about them very much at all. Those who do think about them are usually on two ends of a spectrum, from inbox 0 to inbox 100,000.

For those on the far end of the spectrum, we are there to help. Digital organizing is just like our home organizing services in that we offer customized solutions based on your needs. We discuss, assess, and make a plan. Once we have created a system that works for you, it is usually up to you to maintain it. But some clients don't want to do maintenance! They love the system, but they want to enjoy it without keeping it up. We can help with that too.

I have a few clients that I work with on a regular basis to help maintain their digital systems. This includes file renaming, digital filing, photo organizing, and email organizing. Some people hire a personal assistant to help them keep things tidy and under control, but working with our team has the added bonus of continually evolving systems. Since we develop these systems side-by-side with our clients, we can very efficiently help to maintain them and make improvements as we go.

One of my maintenance clients is a business owner who travels the world to visit her clients. She leads a busy, fast-paced, and full life. Email communication is a critical part of her business, but maintaining a clear inbox is a serious challenge for her. We worked together two years ago to organize and digitize thousands of files for her business, as well as personal files and photos. You can learn more about that project in this blog post!

Now, I have a virtual session once a month during which I review her very crowded inbox, delete unwanted inquiries and irrelevant emails, file important emails in folders, and unsubscribe her from e-lists. I create new folders as needed to make sure that she can find any of her emails easily. I can easily do this accurately based on what I know from our years of work together. This past month her inbox went from 2,500 emails to 150 emails over the course of a 4-hour session! When we started working together, she had more than 150,000 emails in her inbox. This is a fully remote session, which means that we are not together physically or talking at all. The work just gets done so that my client can focus on the parts of her business that she loves.

There is no right way to organize, and there is no right way to maintain a system. It is okay to want or need help!