Free checklist · forty steps · four weeks · no app, no account, nothing to log into
Free checklist · Haven Smith & Company
Declutter your digital life in four sittings.
Forty steps, grouped into four weeks of about twenty minutes each. You tick them off in order. Nothing to install, no account to make, and no password to hand anybody.
Free · 9 pages · Arrives in about a minute
Week one · your accounts
40
steps, in the order that makes them fast
4
sittings of about twenty minutes, one a week
0
apps to install, accounts to make, or passwords to hand over
Everything in the checklist happens in settings screens and apps you already have. There is nothing to connect, and nobody asks you for a login. That is on purpose, and page nine explains why.
Why it never gets done
It was never a discipline problem.
I have watched a lot of people try to sort this out in one long weekend, and I have done it myself. It does not work, and the reason is not willpower.
A digital life is not one pile. It is five or six unrelated piles that happen to live on the same devices: your accounts, your money, your files, your photographs, your devices and the people who would need any of it. Each one lives somewhere different and each one is decided differently.
So when you sit down to do all of it at once, you spend the first hour moving between piles, and every move costs you the thread. Two hours in you have a half-sorted inbox, a folder called Desktop Old, and no idea what you actually have. That is what makes people stop, and stopping there is worse than not starting, because now you believe it cannot be done.
One pile per sitting fixes it. You are not more organized on the fourth week than you were on the first. You are just only ever holding one thing.
The part that makes it work
Find everything first. Decide afterwards.
One rule, and it is the whole method. Every sitting is a hunt, and the decisions come at the end of the hunt.
The moment you stop to cancel a subscription, close an account or sort one folder, you are out of the hunt. You come back forty minutes later having handled one thing, and the list you were building is gone.
So each sitting has a timer on it, you write down what you find as you find it, and you decide nothing until the timer ends. It feels slower. It is about three times faster, and it is the difference between a tidy afternoon and a digital life you can actually rely on afterwards.
What you are getting
Four weeks, and what is true at the end of each.
The checklist is the steps. Here is what you will have when each sitting is over, which is the part worth looking at before you give anybody an email address.
Week one
8 steps · about 22 min
Your accounts
Read the list of accounts you already have, which is sitting in your password manager or your browser, and read it as one list for the first time. Write down the email address each one uses. Then choose a single address for the accounts that matter and start moving them across.
By the end of week oneYou know how many accounts you have, which email address each one is attached to, and which ones you are keeping. That last part is what makes the next three weeks possible.
Week two
6 steps · about 20 min
Your money
Banking, credit, loans, investments, wallets and payment apps, then every subscription and recurring charge going twelve months back. The phone subscription screen and PayPal’s automatic payments are in here, because they are where the forgotten ones hide.
By the end of week twoThis is the sitting that pays for itself. You have a list of every recurring charge with a decision against each one, and the annual renewals are on it, which is the reason to go back twelve months rather than three.
Week three
8 steps · about 25 min
Your files and photographs
Photographs first, and duplicates and screenshots before anything else, because that is where the afternoon goes. Then cloud storage, then Desktop, Documents and Downloads, then a naming pattern and a folder structure you will keep to.
By the end of week threeYou know where your files live, where they are backed up, and what each storage account is for. One pattern, written down, so you are not inventing it again in six months.
Week four
7 steps · about 20 min
Your devices and your people
Every device you own, including the ones in a drawer, and the ones you no longer own but are still signed in somewhere. Then your contacts, cleared and corrected, with your emergency people and your priority people marked.
By the end of week fourThis is the sitting that turns a tidy digital life into one somebody else could step into. Your devices are listed, the old ones are off your accounts, and the people who would need to reach any of it are marked.
Free · 9 pages · Arrives in about a minute
Before you open anything
Three rules, and the whole thing works.
Ten minutes of setup before the first sitting, so each of the four starts with the work rather than with deciding how to work.
01
Pick where the record goes
A notebook, a spreadsheet or a document. Decide once, before the first sitting, because the record is the point of the exercise and the tidying is not.
02
Put four sittings on the calendar
One a week, named. A checklist with no time against it is a list of things you feel bad about, and you already have one of those.
03
Set a timer, and stop when it ends
Twenty minutes. Stopping on time is what makes you come back next week, and coming back next week is the only thing that finishes this.
Also in the nine pages
The four weeks are most of it, not all of it.
The bonus round
Seven searches that find what you missed. Most people turn up more accounts weeks after they were certain they had listed every one, and these are the seven places those turn up: your email, your password manager, every browser profile, your app store purchases, your financial records, and the Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta dashboards.
If you only do three things
For anybody who is not going to do forty steps, and that is a reasonable position to take. Three of them carry most of the result, they take one sitting between them, and the page explains why those three.
The five ways to clear an inbox
Delete it, decline it, defend against it, document it, or do it. Every message gets one of the five, and unsubscribing rather than deleting is what stops you doing this again next month.
Why there is no app in here
There are apps that promise all of this in ninety seconds, and they work by asking for the logins to the accounts you are trying to protect. Page nine has a rule for deciding, and the rule will still be true when every one of those apps has been renamed.
“Find everything first. Decide afterwards.”
Send it over
Four sittings, starting this week.
Nine pages, free, in your inbox in about a minute, and there is a download link on the next page so you do not have to wait for it. You will also get the weekly email, which is one practical thing about running your digital life. Leave any time, in one click.
Before you hand over an email address
Fair questions.
Do I have to connect anything, or install anything?
No. Every step happens in a settings screen, an app or a website you already use, and you are the one opening it. Nothing in the checklist asks you to connect an account to a third party or to hand over a password, and page nine explains why that is a rule rather than an oversight.
How long does this really take?
Four sittings of about twenty minutes, one a week, so roughly an hour and a half of actual work spread across a month. Week three runs longer if your photographs are in a bad state, and the checklist tells you which part of week three to do first so that it does not run away with the afternoon.
I have tried decluttering before and gave up. Why would this be different?
Because it does not ask you to do it all at once, and because it separates finding from deciding. Those two things are what make people stop, and both of them are structural rather than personal. If you have given up before, you gave up at the point where the method was working against you.
What if I only have one evening?
Turn to the page called if you only do three things. Three steps carry most of the result, they fit in one sitting, and doing those three is a genuinely good outcome. The other thirty-seven are still there when you want them.
Is this a funnel?
The checklist is complete on its own, and plenty of people will do the four weeks and never buy anything, which is a fine outcome. We also sell a paid system that goes further, and the checklist says so on the last page rather than pretending otherwise. You will get the weekly email, and one click ends that.
What do I get, and how?
A nine-page PDF. The next page has a download button, so you can open it straight away, and the email carries the same link in case you want it later. Nothing to log into, nothing that expires, and it is yours to print.
Who wrote this
Hello, I am Ashley.
I have spent more than twenty years in product research and design, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, compliance and privacy, including as vice president of product research in business banking at JPMorgan Chase, where I worked on fraud prevention and payments alongside thousands of small business owners. I hold a master of science in human factors and systems engineering.
Which is a long way of saying that I have spent my career looking at the gap between a system that passes an audit and a system a person can actually use. Everything I have ever seen go wrong for somebody, at work or at home, started in the same place: nothing was written down.
So this checklist is not about tidiness. It is about ending up with a record of what you have, where it lives, and who could reach it. The decluttering is how you get there. The record is the thing.
After the four weeks
Clearing it out is the first month.
A cleared-out digital life is worth having on its own. It is also the point at which the harder questions become answerable, and they are the ones people come to us with.
Can you get back into your own accounts if you lose your phone. Would anybody else be able to, if they had to. Is the record you just built somewhere the right person would find it, and would they know what to do with it.
Those are the three things the rest of our work is about, and they are the same three pillars in the same order every time.
Pillar 1
Organize
Know what you have, and keep only what you need. That is the four weeks you are about to do.
Pillar 2
Protect
Secure your accounts and know your recovery path, before you need it.
Pillar 3
Prepare
Make sure the right people can find what matters, and know what to do with it.
Start with the four weeks
Forty steps. Four sittings. One record at the end.
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