How many photos do you have on your mobile device?

For many people, photos take up the enormous amounts of memory space on their phones. With most of us having a smart phone for over a decade, that means thousands and thousands of pictures are stored at our fingertips. Given how easy it is to take a photo (or dozens of photos) to remember an event or meeting, the challenge becomes keeping track of these important visual artifacts.

Tiago Forte, creator of Building a Second Brain, has thought about this problem. His solution is detailed in a recent blog post called The Ultimate Guide to Storing, Managing, and Enjoying Your Photos. He starts by discussing how NOT to store your photos.

Let’s clarify first where photos should NOT go: Your notes app is not the right place to store photos or videos because it’s not made to handle large-sized media (which would generally slow it down). 

I keep my photos in Google Photos which means they’re always securely stored in the cloud. 

Since I take the majority of my photos on my phone (which is probably true for most people), they’re automatically uploaded and backed up via the Google Photos app. 

He moves on to tackle the question of how to organize photos. Surprisingly, this is not as difficult as it first appears.

The good news is: You don’t really need to because Google Photos automatically organizes your photos for you in various ways. 

By default, you’ll view your photos in an infinite timeline organized by date with the oldest ones at the bottom and the newest ones at the top. 

However, Tiago soon moves away from the mechanics of storing photos to a more meaningful puzzle.

Now, the question remains: What should you do with all the photos you’re taking? How can they add beauty and meaning to your life instead of just sitting around on a server somewhere? 

To learn the answer to that question, please read the rest of his post.

“I’ll keep that, just-in-case …”

How many times have you held on to an item just-in-case you need it later. Perhaps it was some extra band-aids in your travel bag, or an Allen wrench from that bookshelf you built, or an old phone charger that might fit another device. All these things seem useful to keep about just-in-case, but are they worth the space they take up in your cabinets or drawers?

The Minimalists are Emmy-nominated Netflix stars and New York Times–bestselling authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. They describe the category of just-in-case items this way:

We often hold on to things just in case we need them: We don’t let go because we might need something in some far-off, nonexistent, hypothetical future. We pack too much stuff in the remotest chance we might need something for trips and vacations.

We needn’t hold on to these things just in case: We rarely use our just-in-case items—they sit there, take up space, get in the way, weigh us down. Most of the time they aren’t items we need at all.

So how do we decide what to keep and what may be thrown away? The Minimalists developing a simple test that they call the 20/20 rule.

Anything we get rid of that we truly need, we can replace for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes from our current location. … This theory likely works 99% of the time for 99% of all items and 99% of all people—including you.

To their point of view, this means that most just-in-case items don’t earn their keep. In their own experience, almost none of the items they have thrown away have ever been needed again!

I invite you to take up their challenge and see how many of your just-in-case items are truly clutter.

This weekend I got into the tidying zone. The target was my home and office work desks. Paperwork and other items had gotten out of control and required dedicated attention to resolve. The cleanup also included the desk drawers, which contained all sorts of strange items.

Marie Kondo has through a lot about how to tidy up odd spaces in the house. On her website, she shares tips on how to get those spaces under control. One of the most important steps to clean a drawer or closet is to take everything out.

Taking everything out of junk drawers and other komono hot spots and laying it out provides a fresh view of all the contents. You may find something that was once missing or something you forgot you owned. It is an opportunity for re-acquainting yourself with the objects that live with you and recognizing those that spark joy and those that don’t.

The rationale for this is simple; it takes just as much energy to put the item back in the original spot as it would to simply toss it or place it in a more appropriate location. However, that leads to the question of how to organize these miscellaneous items so that they remain functional and not lost in an out of the way space. Marie’s approach is to compartmentalize.

Komono is hard to contain when not carefully thought through. Organize the contents of a komono drawer by category. When you open it to reach for your scissors or letter opener, have those sharp items live together. Matches and lighters can live together as fire-starters. Grocery list paper and your favorite pencil should be neighbors.

Small items that live in these kinds of komono drawers tend to jostle around every time the drawer is open and closed. Junk drawer organizers and small compartments within help keep like-with-like and protect the drawer from becoming jumbled again.

Review all the steps to tidying odd spaces on the Konmari website.