I Did a Digital Deep Clean

23,847 Unread Emails

I looked at my Gmail inbox one day. 23,847 unread messages. Mostly newsletters, shopping promotions, service notifications. Important emails were buried in this ocean. Last month I missed a critical tax-related email and paid the deadline 3 days late. The late fee was about $10. (That $10 triggered the whole digital deep clean.)

I blocked off an entire weekend to clean up my digital life.

Saturday Morning: Email Purge

Started with unsubscribing. Search "unsubscribe" in Gmail and every email with an unsubscribe link shows up. Clicked through each one. 67 newsletters and marketing lists, unsubscribed. This alone took 1 hour 40 minutes.

Some senders keep emailing even after you unsubscribe. For those, I created filters for automatic deletion. Then I selected all 23,000+ remaining emails and marked them as read. Just zeroed it out. What if something important was in there? If it was buried among 23,847 emails, it was already lost.

Saturday Afternoon: App Purge

127 apps on my phone. I counted how many I'd opened at least once in the past month. 34. The remaining 93 were just sitting there, untouched.

Deleted all 93. While deleting, I kept thinking "I might need this later..." But apps can be reinstalled in 5 minutes. Keeping something "just in case" when the reinstallation cost is near zero is irrational.

After the purge, phone storage freed up 18.3GB. More importantly, the visual noise when opening the app drawer dropped significantly. Finding the app I actually wanted became much easier.

Sunday Morning: Subscription Audit

I went through credit card statements and listed every monthly auto-charge. 14 services. Netflix, YouTube Premium, Spotify, iCloud, ChatGPT Plus, GitHub Copilot, Notion, Figma, 1Password, Adobe Creative Cloud, Coupang RocketWow (Korean Amazon Prime equivalent), and three more Korean content subscriptions.

Monthly total: about $140. That was a wake-up call. Nearly $140 per month leaking to subscriptions.

Evaluated each one. Two book subscription services I hadn't used in 3 months. Canceled. Adobe Creative Cloud for occasional Photoshop use at $200/year felt excessive. Replaced with Photopea (free web app). A shopping membership I barely used. Canceled.

Four cancellations dropped monthly subscriptions from $140 to about $107. Saving $33/month.

Sunday Afternoon: Cloud Storage Cleanup

Google Drive had 4,732 files. Over half were college assignments. I had no reason to keep a 2018 operating systems homework file. Backed up everything pre-2020 to a local drive and deleted from cloud.

Photos too. Over 3,800 screenshots in Google Photos. Delivery tracking captures, WiFi password captures, chat screenshots. All necessary in their moment, all useless now. Bulk deleted.

Did Anything Actually Change?

No dramatic transformation, honestly. But small improvements. A clean inbox means I'm less likely to miss important emails. Fewer apps means I open what I intend to, not what catches my eye. $33/month saved adds up.

The biggest change is psychological. A clean digital space makes my head feel a bit cleaner. Could be placebo. But if placebo makes you feel better, that still counts, doesn't it?