Hoarding

Apparently, we’ve produced enough clothing for 6 generations.

I wonder how many data analysts it’d take to make sense of all the digital clutter we accumulate with analytics, heatmap tools, tracking, cookies, and whatnot, or how long it’ll take a family like mine to sort through the tens-of-thousands of photos we’ve taken, just in the last couple of years.

Digital stuff is easy to hoard. We accumulate:

• Apps on our phone
• Cloud apps for “work”
• Analytics data
• Photos
• …which need ever increasing amounts of storage
• Emails
• …which need ever increasing amounts of storage
• Zoom recordings
• Music
• Movies

My personal Gmail account broke last week, the one I’ve used for about 15 years and never cleaned out (apparently you shouldn’t ignore that warning when it says you’ve used 97% of your storage, even when it’s still “only” at 97%). I stopped getting emails for about a week, and missed some important stuff about the building I live in.

Clutter – even clutter you can’t see – is a big waste. And as it turns out, when you miss important stuff because of it, it makes a really weak case for keeping it.

I spent 30 minutes clearing out YEARS worth of old emails (literally selecting-all and deleting entire years of email) to get the space back. Next mission is to tackle the 130k photos we’ve taken since 2020… it’s not a clean out – it’ll be the most epic slide night we’ve never had 😀

My point:

Hoarding creates work by creating clutter, and digital hoarding is insidious because it happens sneakily when you’re not looking. It’s hard to stay on top of, but there are ways to do it. I’ve got one really good one for you tomorrow 🙂