The H.O.H. Project: De-Cluttering Part 2

You can read more of my Making Our House Our Home Series here:
Introduction: Love Your Home
Part One: Making a Plan
Part Two: De-Cluttering Part 1
So last week I discussed the most obvious of de-cluttering, physical stuff. No doubt about it, the physical stuff in our lives can really cluttering things up. In our homes, cars, and beyond. However, there was more than the physical stuff that I knew was cluttering up my life. I also had loads and loads of digital clutter.
You know when your email in box is full and you end up deleting most of it? That is clutter. We don't always think of it because it isn't sitting right there staring us in the face all day long, but it takes up valuable time. In order to streamline my inbox, I unsubscribed from almost every mailing list I was on. (If you don't know, most mass emails have a link at the bottom that allows you to be removed from the list. In some cases you just click the link and you are taken off and at other times you have to enter your email or click a button that says that you do really want to unsubscribe.) This de-cluttering actual served two purposes, it cleaned out my inbox AND it took away many of the temptations to go and buy more stuff. If I don't have a coupon to shop at a store, I probably won't go to that store and buy things that I don't need. If I don't know what the daily deal sites are selling, I won't go and order it.
I also cut way back on the amount of blogs I read. I love reading blogs. I love the great ideas blogs provide for my life. However, they were taking up too much of my time. If I didn't check my Google reader for a few  days I could have hundreds of blog entries to catch up on. It was just too much. So I now I have only a handful of blogs in my reader. It is much more relaxing this way and takes up less of my time.
We also de-cluttered and organized our computer and its files. We bought an external hard drive and backed up our entire computer. This way we can keep less on our laptop and also not worry about losing files if something would happen to our computer. (Thankfully Mr. Cherry took care of this stuff since he is the computer guru in this house.)