A Digital Housekeeping Checklist for the Whole Household
The short version: work through your digital life in five passes — accounts and logins, files and photos, subscriptions and money-in-motion, devices, and the sentimental layer — clearing what you don't need and making what stays findable by someone who isn't you. Never gather your passwords into one document; point at your password manager instead, and keep one sealed master key offline. Put a date on it. Do it in passes, not in one grim weekend.
This is the digital version of a Swedish idea called döstädning — "death cleaning" — which sounds bleak and isn't. The practice is simple: over time, you clear the clutter that would otherwise become someone else's problem, and you do it mostly because a lighter, more findable life is nicer to live. The kindness to whoever comes after is a side effect of tidying for yourself first.
The trouble is that the clutter that matters most now has no attic. It's the hundred-odd accounts, the files in three places, the subscriptions renewing in the dark, the phone that stands between everything and everyone else. You can't see it in a room. This checklist is how you go through it anyway.
Before you start: legible beats tidy
One idea makes the whole thing work. You are not trying to make your digital life neat. You are trying to make it legible — findable and usable by someone who wasn't there when you set it up.
A perfectly tidy system can be completely illegible, because the logic lived in your head. So at every step the test isn't "does this look organised," it's "could the person I trust find this and know what to do, without me in the room?" Most of what we call being organised quietly fails that test. Keep it in mind and the list below almost sorts itself.
The five passes
Do them in any order, but do them in passes — an hour here, a shelf there — not as a single sitting. And keep the two rules from the top: never write your passwords into one document, and put a date on whatever you make, so the next reader (including future you) knows how much to trust it.
1. Accounts and logins
This is the keystone pass, because almost everything else hangs off it.
- Adopt a password manager if you haven't, and get your accounts into it. This one change does most of the work: it turns "a hundred scattered logins" into "one thing to point at."
- Prune dead accounts. Old shopping sites, forums, a service you used once — close what you can. Fewer accounts is fewer things to find and fewer places to leak.
- Find your master email. One account can usually reset the password to all the others. Know which one it is; it's the single most important login you own.
- Turn on legacy access where it exists. Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, and similar features let a trusted person reach your accounts if something happens. Set them up now — they take minutes and they're exactly built for this.
- Do not make a password document. A single file with all your passwords is the most dangerous object you can create: a catastrophe if it leaks, and wrong the day after you write it. Point at the manager instead.
2. Files and photos
The stuff that's "everywhere and nowhere" — some in email, some in a photos app, some in a folder you named sensibly once and never opened.
- Consolidate to one home per kind of thing. Documents in one place, photos in one place. You don't need perfect folders; you need a survivor to know where to look.
- Delete the obvious dead weight. Duplicates, screenshots you'll never need, the download folder's decade of PDFs. Legible means less to search.
- Name the important few clearly. The will, the deeds, the policies, the tax records — a handful of documents deserve names a stranger could read. Everything else can stay messy.
- Check what happens if the account closes. Photos and files tied to one email or one cloud login vanish with it. Know which are hostage to which account.
3. Subscriptions and money-in-motion
The quiet leak, and the one that keeps billing a card long after anyone's watching.
- List what auto-renews. Streaming, storage, software, memberships, the gym. Most people are surprised by two or three they'd forgotten.
- Cancel what you don't use. This pass usually pays for itself in an afternoon.
- Note anything that would bill silently. A subscription tied to a card that outlives you will renew against a dead person's account for a year unless someone knows it exists to stop it. The fix is simply that it's findable.
- Point at the money, never the PIN. Which bank holds the day-to-day money, which account pays the bills — where it is, not how to get in.
4. Devices
The physical keys to the invisible life.
- The phone is the master device. Increasingly it's the single thing a survivor most needs to get into, because it holds the authentication codes for everything else. Make sure someone trusted can — through a legacy-access feature or a sealed record of how it unlocks, never a note stuck to it.
- Know which devices hold what. The laptop with the tax files, the old tablet that's still logged into the photo account, the drive in the drawer.
- Wipe and retire what you've replaced. The cable drawer of döstädning: old phones and laptops still logged into live accounts are clutter with a security bill attached.
5. The sentimental layer
Döstädning's gentlest pass, and the one people actually enjoy.
- Decide about the photos and letters while you can narrate them. The value of a photo is often the story only you know. A short caption now is worth more than a perfect archive later — and it's a good excuse to look through them.
- Let the small stuff go. You do not owe your family the job of deciding about things you could decide about yourself. That decision is the kindness.
- Keep the few that matter, findable. This is where it meets What Stays: the point isn't to clear everything, it's to make sure what you keep can actually be found and understood.
Every one of those passes ends in the same place — not a tidier app, but an answer to one plain question: where is this, and who would someone call about it? That's small enough to write on a single sheet — the pointers, never the secrets. Fill one in by hand as you work through the list, and you've done the legible half of the job on paper, today, before any software exists to keep it current.
Take the paper version with you.
One A4 page to fill in by hand — where things are and who to call, never the secrets themselves. We’re building the software version; leave your email and we’ll send you the map now, and one note when it’s ready.
No newsletter, no drip — the map now, one email when it ships. Unsubscribe any time.
The one secret: keep a master key, offline
There's one exception to "never write the secrets down." If your whole digital life sits behind a password manager, then one secret genuinely matters: the master password, and a way into the device that holds it. You can't point at that one — somebody eventually has to have it.
The safe way isn't a file. It's a real-world instrument: a sealed envelope in a safe, or with your solicitor alongside the will, that a trusted person opens only when the time comes. Your records point at that envelope; the envelope holds the actual secret. Trust plus physical possession, with no live-password document sitting around for years. (This is the same discipline as an in-case-I-die file — a map, not a vault.)
Do it in passes, and put a date on it
The reason most digital clear-outs fail isn't that people do them badly. It's that they do them once. The pass you made in 2019 lists a bank you've left and a password manager you hadn't adopted. By the time it matters, it's a fossil.
So the practice, not the project: a little at a time, dated, returned to when life changes — a new account, a house move, a death in the family that makes you someone else's executor. An out-of-date map is worse than an honest note saying "last checked in March." You can do all of this with a folder and a calendar reminder, and if that's where you are, start today. Keeping it current by hand is the part that quietly fails.
What we're building for this
Keeping that map current, safe, and ready to print is what we're building Hovenly Continuity to do — it holds the pointers and never the secrets, keeps the master key behind a sealed envelope exactly as above, nudges you when an answer's gone stale, and degrades to ink: at any moment it prints to a plain runbook someone you trust can hold in their hands. The documents layer — the will, the policies, the deeds — lives in Papers, so the important few are named, dated, and findable rather than scattered across a drawer and three apps.
Continuity is the corner of the suite we're building next, after Larder, Papers, and Days. If this is a problem you recognise, you can reserve a founding place — you won't be charged until it's in your hands, and you can leave at any time.
(If you'd rather read the thinking than the checklist, the essay The Last Tidy is about exactly this — döstädning moved from the attic to the account, and why being legible is the kindest thing you can leave.)
This is a practical guide, not legal or financial advice. Your will, your power of attorney, your super nomination and your tax affairs are decisions for you and your solicitor, adviser or accountant. This checklist sits alongside those instruments — its only job is to make your digital life lighter to live now, and findable by the people you trust later.