There are more than 2 billion users around the world who watch over a billion hours of video, generating billions of views, every single day on YouTube. With such an abundance of content uploaded daily, it’s natural to lose yourself to mindlessly watching random videos on the platform. It eventually compounds and you’re left with a messy and overwhelming feed of content. You will never be able to fully dictate your entire feed. However, you can try to keep pushing it in the right direction.

Why cleansing is needed: Our attention spans have dwindled over time. We never had unlimited attention in the first place to accommodate the influx of so much information from so many avenues in the recent decade. And now, a single platform delivers never-ending content. You’ll never be able to consume all the content in the world. What do you do in this case? You prune your reading and watch lists. YouTube is the same and there’s too much content out there. But don’t worry. Here are a few simple tips to declutter your YouTube feed that works for me.

How cleansing can be done: Before I jumped into tweaking the settings, the first thing I asked myself was ‘what kind of content do I want to watch on YouTube?’ I quickly realised ‘whatever appeared on my feed’ wasn’t the correct answer. You will need to decide the primary topics you wish to watch. It could be cooking, DIY, travel vlogs, science experiments or gaming. This simple but overlooked step will later help you in keeping things organised. It’s optional but I highly recommend it, even if it’s a broader topic, say, learning skills, gaining knowledge or purely entertainment. Ask yourself every time: ‘Will this video add value to my life?’ You will know what to do if the answer is ‘no’.

Unsubscribe from irrelevant channels. If you’re just like me who has grown up watching YouTube videos, your subscriptions could be a mess. A nostalgic mess to be precise, considering it would include channels you subscribed to from your early years on the internet. And now, most of them have to go. Head to your subscriptions, then ‘Manage’ and remove the channels which you no longer watch. I know it’s difficult but do it. Bonus tip: I found it easier to unsubscribe in bulk using the mobile app with simple swipe and tap gestures.

Remove old saved playlists and videos. It’s impossible to watch every video that pops up in your feed. Hence, you end up saving them for later. Sometimes this includes entire playlists. Or maybe you created custom playlists to save specific videos. Over the years, you must have accumulated hundreds of videos. I want you to purge them. Tap on ‘Library’ from the mobile app, open the ‘Watch later’ playlist along with all the other saved playlists below it and remove everything that doesn’t align with your interests anymore.