With an extra hour of sunlight a day, now is the time for spring cleaning. But when you're clearing out your wardrobe and deep cleaning the kitchen, don't forget about the other kinds of storage you're probably filling up: your phone's.
From promotional emails lurking in your inbox to countless concert videos from years gone by, our phones can take a lot before they start to slow down.
Tech journalist for the Irish Times, Ciara O'Brien gives Brendan tips on how to keep phones and laptops in top condition and how to get the best out of them. "A lot of the time what's happening is, there are programmes that are starting up when you start up your laptop and that's slowing them down, or it's just stuffed with files", she said.
She herself was a top offender, she said, constantly saving files to her desktop: "If you are in any way picky about your technology my desktop would give you anxiety because it's just a mass of files."
Without keeping an eye on your storage, it doesn't take long for your laptop or phone to crawl to a halt.
O'Brien suggests starting by clearing out the default apps that boot up once we open our laptops or turn on our phones. If you're not using the built in apps, just delete them.
When it comes to tackling your email, O'Brien said, generative AI has made our lives a lot easier by allowing your email to group promotional and marketing emails into a separate folder that you can find in your inbox. She suggests clearing that entire box out, and even better - unsubscribe from any brands you don't want marketing emails from.
"Prevention is better than cure", she added.
Smartphones usually come with an amount of free cloud storage, but O'Brien noted that backing up your phone - which everyone should be doing regularly - will eat that up in no time. Paying for extra cloud storage is worthwhile, but make sure you give your phone a good clear out too.
"If you want to make the biggest impact, have a look at your videos that are saved to your phone and to your cloud storage and start there", she said. "The phones are great and the cameras are great these days and they can take some really high quality video footage, 4K footage but I can guarantee you that 90 per cent of videos that are on your phone, like if you life to take videos at concerts, you are never going to be watching those again."
Family photos are worth saving of course, but files that were forwarded through WhatsApp and automatically saved might not be things you want to keep.
It's all well and good to clean the inside of your phone, but what about keeping the outside spick and span? O'Brien has one key piece of advice: "Don't get your tech advice from TikTok."
"I've seen people stick hot glue into ports, I've seen people put sharp metal things into ports. Now, generally the advice is don't stick anything inside a port that's not a charging cable. We do have a problem when you stick your phone in your pocket, lint gets in there. Bring it in to somebody."
She adds that using compressed air isn't recommended by experts, either.
Finally, instead of holding onto old phones, recycle them, O'Brien said. "There's valuable materials inside that, stuff that we have to mine the earth to get out. Anything that has a battery, whether it's a child's toy or a rechargable battery in a mobile phone, whether it's a cable, they all go into recycling.
"Be smart about it, wipe your data off it before you send it off to be recycled. Nine times out of 10 they will not be worth money in years to come."
Listen back to the full interview by clicking above.
