Well! Since we have an extra day in this month, take a little time to do a little digital self-care.

We talk about taking care of ourselves, getting away from our machines, putting down our phones, and just getting some time away from things to give our minds a minute to come back to focus.

But we should also take a little time to take care of our digital forefront, as well.

Here are a few things that you can do to take care of yourself:

• Declutter your Twitter following list.
  • That means heading to twitter.com in a web browser, logging in, clicking on Profile on the left side, and next to your following count, click the word Following.
  • Evaluate the list of folks you’re following. If seeing their tweets gives you a case of the dry heaves and you’d feel better not seeing them? Unfollow them.
    • Bonus action: you can also temporarily block someone, then unblock them to remove a follow-back if one exists. Not a required action, but it’s handy if you want to protect your timeline and don’t want to grandfather in some accounts.
  • If you want to keep following someone, but don’t give a damn about their retweets, hit their profile, go into the three dot menu next to their profile pic, and TURN OFF RETWEETS.
• Clean out your email inbox. That means…
  • Go on an unsubscription jag. Get emails from services that you don’t particularly care about? UNSUBSCRIBE.
  • Go delete those old password reset emails. You know the ones from 10 years ago.
  • Delete those old sale ads. That Newegg sale from a decade ago doesn’t apply and you don’t need to reference it.
• Back up your important stuff.
  • I’m going to hand you some sage advice that I gave customers at least a decade ago when I worked for a rather large computer company: If you don’t have at least two separately stored backups of your data, it is clearly not important to you.
    • Two, not one. What happens if something breaks both your original file on your computer and breaks the first storage device you’ve put your files on? If those are your company’s accounting files for the last ten years, you want as many possible ways to recover from catastrophic failure. Losing two weeks worth of your data is significantly less painful than losing a full decade.
  • Back up your files on media you have control over. That means external hard drives, removable USB media, burn to optical media (DVD-R, CD-R, BD-R), dump to tape, store on a NAS… just choose at least two of these options.
  • Make a regular habit of reviewing your backups. If your backups are corrupted, infected, or otherwise, it’s pointless.
• Play a video game.
  • Something fun and relaxing for you — doesn’t have to be anything that’s super involved. Just fun.

And with that, February’s about over. See you in March!