The new year is an opportunity to start over and manage your digital space differently. This includes the important task of hitting the reset button not just on yourself, but on your devices as well. Clearing out the old to make room for the new will help your devices run more smoothly and make it easier to find your crucial files and programs.

Here are a few suggestions for how to clean up your devices to empower you — and your devices — to work more effectively in the new year.

1. Archiving old emails

Emails serve as a great reference for past work, so people are often reluctant to delete them. However, if you exceed your inbox memory limit, you will be unable to send/receive new emails. Additionally, keeping every email can make searching through emails painstakingly slow. Don’t fret! You can easily clean up storage space without having to resort to deleting any messages by using the archive feature.

2. Removing junk emails from your inbox

As intuitive as Outlook rules are, some junk mail will always make its way past the filter. While you can simply delete each message, there is a way to identify messages as junk and keep them out of your inbox for good.

3. Clear the cache in your web browser

Your internet browser uses a “cache” tool to store temporary internet files. Those files speed up the page loading process but can cause problems when websites are updated. When you run into any issue online, the first step will usually be to clear your cache.

4. Use Microsoft OneDrive to back up your work

Hard drive failures happen. Every year, the Service Desk receives calls from frantic users who have lost work that wasn’t properly backed up. Setting up OneDrive through your employee Microsoft 365 account as your default location to save files will help you avoid this scenario.