So my work colleagues laugh at me because when someone's coming over to my computer.

Gotcha.

To help me, I'm like, close your eyes.

Don't look at the tabs because they're all open.

I'm Carvo Wallace, and this is How To, the show that isn't afraid to show you our tabs.

Each week, listeners bring us their problems.

And sometimes they're thorny relationship questions,

and sometimes they're internal struggles, like how to silence your inner critic.

But sometimes we get a question that's more practical, like what to do with all the files

and photos and screenshots that you have on your computer and phone.

In other words, how do you organize your digital life?

Today's listener, Safia, is a Genhexer who embraced technology early in life,

but in a lot of ways she hasn't really kept up.

And some of that is because everything is different now than it used to be.

Everything is more virtual, more social, more remote. But some of it is because we now have more digital stuff than we used to. More photos and screenshots and documents. And as more of our lives have become digital, our digital lives have become more chaotic. When Safia started a new job teaching at a university, she began to realize that

she's a little overwhelmed by that digital chaos, and she needs some help to sort it out.

I don't know if you've ever seen those memes where someone's sitting next to a big pile of

papers that's just about to topple over on their head. That is how I feel, but the digital

version of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will tell you that up until about two weeks ago, when the

IT guy called me and said, you have to upgrade your work computer to Windows 11, everything was on my

computer. I was not really using the cloud at all,

even though apparently we're supposed to be doing that all the time.

...