Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digital trails.

Our endless photo and video streams, bursting inboxes and unread subscriptions all feed the appetite for ever growing digital infrastructure. The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online – browsing the web or social media, streaming music or videos, or communicating – producing the equivalent of 229kg of carbon emissions, a study in Nature Communications found. And using AI tools and chatbots to generate text, images or video consumes “orders of magnitude” more energy than traditional computing methods.

Clearing out digital clutter does more than just shrink your environmental impact – it can also provide a welcome boost to your mental health and productivity. So, why not give your devices and cloud storage a spring clean?

Getting your digital house in order

I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing the soul-crushing frustration of looking for lost files or photos online, or simply trying to get my IT working properly. An IDC study of 840 information workers has found the average employee wastes more than two hours each week hunting for lost files and online documents.

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Libby Sadler, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University, says organising our digital files and devices not only prevents time being lost but also reduces the cognitive friction and drain that occurs when we aren’t organised.

“Not being able to find things or having apps crash or run slowly because we haven’t updated software also puts us in a negative mood, which isn’t great for our work or life in general,” she says.

Her advice is to start simple: empty your online trash bins, unsubscribe from things you don’t read and delete any apps you don’t use. Another tip is make sure you have enough memory available and select a single cloud provider to store everything, rather than having your information spread across multiple platforms.

Andrew Cullen, senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says it is useful to think of a digital declutter as akin to cleaning a house – it may feel overwhelming but it’s not something you have to complete all at once. “Maybe you start off by just deleting all old emails from that online store you visited once. And while you’re at it, consider unsubscribing too. You’ll be amazed how quickly digital junk disappears if you just spend a few minutes on it every week.

“When it comes to photos, the cloud storage providers can help you out – they have tools to find blurry photos, which are a great thing to give the flick to. But you can also just select a whole day’s worth of photos and delete them too.”

Protecting your data from the AI tech barons

At a time when AI companies are scraping available data to serve their own commercial ends, it is more vital than ever to keep our digital lives in order.

“Sometimes that’s books, or YouTube videos, but other times it’s 10-year-old selfies from your Instagram, or things from social media accounts that we’ve long since stopped using,” Cullen says. “While these may be things that you no longer value, they’re valuable to AI companies and, really, anyone who wants to learn about you.”

When our data is floating around on phones, email servers and cloud services, it takes a proactive effort to expunge digital fluff.

“In an age where so much data is being collected about us, it’s important to ask both what we’re holding on to things for, and who else might value that data,” Cullen says.

“At some point, we are likely to go through old receipts and throw them out … But if you compare that to emails from an old real estate agent, it’s easy to say: out of sight, out of mind. But those emails could contain scans of your ID, or records of your job history, or a million other things we wouldn’t want someone finding.”

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Consider limiting AI use in the first place – by unsubscribing from AI platforms, excluding AI results from search (for example, by adding “-AI” to the end of a search query) and avoiding using it for unnecessary or energy-intensive tasks such as text-to-video prompts, or AI-generated images for celebrations or work presentations.

Endlessly wasted data

Slowly but surely, the cost of storing our data is increasing – both financially and environmentally. Popular storage platform Dropbox reported earnings of US $2.5bn from 18 million customers in 2025, each paying $138 on average.

Google Photos alone holds over 9tn photos, Cullen says. “On a service that has only been around for 11 years, that’s an insane amount of photos. If we filled up phones with photos and nothing else, that’s enough to fill up over 100 million phones, and is about 1% of all the data stored in all the world’s datacentres.

“That these companies give this away for free should really underscore the value that it brings them.”

Sadler agrees, adding that while undergoing a digital spring clean of old files, emails, photos, unused accounts and cloud storage won’t solve the problem alone, it will help make us more conscious of how much digital information we create, store and keep indefinitely.

“Ask yourself: what do we really need to keep, what can be deleted, and what we are asking organisations to store on our behalf?”