Spring Cleaning Your Digital Presence

Spring is here, and with it comes that familiar urge to clean out the cobwebs. We reorganize our closets. We throw away things we haven't used in years. We dust off corners of our homes that haven't seen daylight since last season.

But there's one place most of us completely neglect during spring cleaning: our digital presence.

I'm talking about the mess we've accumulated online. The abandoned accounts. The outdated bios. The social media profiles that haven't been updated since 2019. The broken links in your Instagram bio. The sites you forgot you created. The email lists you're still on but don't recognize. All of it sitting there, cluttering your online identity, sending a confused signal to anyone who actually goes looking for you.

This year, I decided to do something about it. And I'm going to walk you through exactly what I found—and what I fixed.

The Audit: What Do You Actually Have Out There?

The first step was brutal honesty. I sat down with a spreadsheet and started listing every single online presence I could remember creating:

Three different Twitter accounts (why?)
An old LinkedIn profile I hadn't looked at in five years
A Medium account with one draft post from 2021
A Substack that got exactly zero subscribers
Three Gmail addresses I'd forgotten I owned
A Mastodon account from the Great Twitter Exodus that I posted to exactly twice
A GitHub profile that had some old projects I'd completely abandoned
A Patreon page I'd set up "just in case"
Dozens of accounts on platforms I couldn't even remember signing up for

When I looked at the complete list, I felt embarrassed. But I also felt something else: relief. Finally seeing it all in one place meant I could actually deal with it.

The goal of this audit isn't to shame yourself. It's to understand what you have, what's actually representing you, and what's just noise.

The Delete Phase: Letting Go

Once I could see the full picture, the decision became clear: most of these accounts weren't serving me. They weren't serving anyone else either.

The old Substack? No one was reading it.

The Medium account with a draft? I'd clearly lost interest years ago.

The multiple Twitter accounts? Just confusion.

The abandoned GitHub projects? Not helping anyone. Not even me.

So I started deleting. Exporting where I could, deleting where I couldn't. Some platforms made this easy—a simple "delete account" button and goodbye. Others required me to jump through hoops: confirming my email, waiting 30 days, jumping through verification loops.

(This is why I'm so passionate about building Jottings with data export and deletion as first-class features. No one should have to fight with a platform to reclaim their digital identity.)

But here's what surprised me: deleting stuff felt good. Each account I removed was one less place I had to maintain. One less place sending me notifications I didn't care about. One less login I had to remember. One less outdated bio that made me cringe.

The Consolidation: Finding Your Center

After the deletions came the harder work: consolidation.

I'd been spread across maybe fifteen different platforms, each claiming it was "the" place to find me online. But the truth is simpler: I don't need to be everywhere. I need to be somewhere, in a place that actually represents who I am and what I care about.

This is where your thinking needs to shift. Instead of asking "which platform should I be on?", ask instead: "what is the central hub for my online presence?"

For me, that became obvious pretty quickly. I wanted a place where:

I could share whatever I wanted—writing, links, photos, ideas
I could control the presentation
The content was actually mine
No algorithm decided who would see it
No platform could shut me down or change the rules
It lived on my own subdomain

(Obvious disclaimer: I built Jottings. So yes, my answer is to use Jottings. But the principle is universal—you need a home base that you own, not rent.)

The consolidation meant making decisions. Which platforms actually mattered to me? I kept:

My main website (for my professional presence)
Jottings (for daily thinking and writing)
Twitter (because yes, there's still value in the conversation there, even if it's chaotic)
LinkedIn (for professional contact)
Maybe one or two others for specific communities I care about

Everything else? Gone.

The Update Phase: Making Your Presence Coherent

Here's the thing about having multiple accounts: they create contradictions. One bio says you're a builder. Another says you're a writer. A third is just your name with no description. Someone trying to figure out who you are just sees confusion.

So the next phase was updating. Not just deleting outdated information, but making everything consistent.

New bios across all platforms. Current links. Real photos (or at least reasonably recent ones). Links that actually work, instead of broken URLs pointing to sites that don't exist anymore.

I made sure every profile linked back to my central hub. And in my central hub, I made sure there were clean links out to the places where I'm actually active.

The goal: if someone wants to find you, they should see a coherent picture. Not a museum of abandoned projects and forgotten accounts.

The Benefit: A Cleaner Digital Identity

Once the dust settled, something shifted. When people looked me up online, they found:

A clear understanding of what I do
Consistent information across platforms
No confusion or contradiction
Active, maintained presences

More importantly, I felt the benefit myself. I spent less time managing accounts that didn't matter. I spent less time seeing notifications from platforms I'd forgotten I cared about. I had more energy to focus on the places where I actually create value.

And here's something unexpected: people told me they appreciated it. They said it was clearer who I was. They said they didn't get lost trying to figure out which account to follow or where to find my latest work.

A clean digital presence isn't just good for you. It's good for everyone trying to find you.

Your Turn

Spring cleaning your digital presence doesn't take a weekend. It takes maybe an afternoon of honest inventory, maybe another afternoon of deletions and updates. But the return on investment is immediate.

Here's your to-do list:

Make a list of every online presence you have
Decide which ones actually matter to you
Delete the rest (your future self will thank you)
Update the ones that remain with current, consistent information
Link them together so they all point to a central hub
Set a reminder to do this again next year

You don't need to be everywhere. You need to be somewhere, fully present and genuinely representing yourself. The paradox of the internet age is that having fewer, more intentional online presences is way more powerful than being scattered across dozens of platforms.

So this spring, clean out your digital closet. Delete what doesn't serve you. Update what remains. And build or maintain one central place where people can actually find the real you—not a collection of forgotten accounts and outdated bios.

Your future self will appreciate the clarity. And the internet will be just a little bit less noisy.

If you're looking for a place to consolidate your digital presence, to own your content, and to build something that's actually yours, Jottings might be exactly what you need. No algorithm decides what gets seen. No ads interrupt your writing. Just you, your words, your links, your photos—presented exactly how you want them.

Start spring cleaning today.