“Why do I have 34,000 photos?” I ask myself as I try to find a specific field photo from last summer. Sure, I take a lot of photos that you see in the pages of Dakota Farmer, but there are numerous “trash” photos or random screenshots on my phone I just don’t need.

Many of us are cognizant of removing physical clutter from our homes. Spring comes around, and anything that doesn’t serve a purpose or that hasn’t been used in years is removed.

But how often do we do a cleanse of our digital clutter? These online filing cabinets of stuff can make us inadvertently spend more time on our devices, bringing more things to sift through before we get to what really matters.

Unread or unneeded emails, unnecessary applications on our smartphones, old bookmarks from web pages we no longer visit, or even contacts from people that we don’t talk to. I’m pretty ruthless when it comes to deleting that digital clutter, but with so much our lives living in the online space, where we do start to clean house? Here are my tips:

Start on socials. How many Facebook pages or Instagram profiles have you accumulated on your following list? Unliking or unfollowing those pages that are no longer relevant for you is an easy way to clean up your news feed from unwanted digital clutter.

Friends or old acquaintances who you’ve fallen out of touch with should be removed. For me, I had plenty of people who I added online from a friend of a friend or for class projects. They took my focus away from the people I really care about! Of course, if they’re old friends you keep up with online only, keep them as friends! The goal with decluttering your social space is to focus on the people and things that matter most to you.

Unsubscribe from email lists. When you have too many emails coming into your inbox, sometimes the important emails can fall by the wayside. At the bottom of most marketing emails, you can find a small “unsubscribe” link, that you can click and follow to either enter your email and remove yourself from mailing lists or be auto-removed from the list. Sometime when I find myself doing a little too much online shopping, I unsubscribe from my favorite shops to avoid the temptations of sales.

Archiving or deleting emails that aren’t needed, such as old receipts, can help keep your inbox free of digital clutter.

Uninstall applications. Nowadays, it seems like everyone and everything has an app. Whether that be something like a fast-food restaurant that gives special discounts to app holders, or that app that helped you get around on a vacation, deleting unused apps can help clean up your home screen.

For apps I don’t use often but might need again, I drop them into a folder I created on my iPhone to clean up my home screen. If you hate swiping through multiple screens of apps, make folders of apps and categorize them by categories such as “photos” or “travel”.

Minimize notifications. How often are you in the middle of something important, trying to focus all your energy to the task, just to get distracted by the short buzz of a notification on your phone. Aside from having my phone on “Do not disturb” on days I have a lot to get done, I also minimize the notifications I leave on.

Rather than having push notifications on for social media channels, weather alerts, or other apps sharing an update, I have notifications only on for phone calls and texts. To keep myself from having to lose my working rhythm, I often will check those notifications on my smart watch to see if I need to answer right away, without picking up my phone and automatically starting to scroll.

While purging my photos is the hardest thing for me to do — because I need 4,000 photos of my dogs — I start each day searching back to memories of the day on my iPhone to purge duplicates or extra images I no longer need. Slowly, I’ll work through the stash to make sure I can find the ones I really love.

No matter if you’re a smartphone savant or enjoy a bit of time on your phone, streamline your online organization with these easy tips to find what matters most.