It's Tidy Tuesday!
This week, as I continue pre-sorting my own data archive into high-level categories, I'll be brief and simply reiterate an important point that applies to pretty much anything related to Tidy Bytes and digital organization:
Set the bar high when determining what data you should keep.
I need to hear this every time I open up a new folder and consider what to do with the contents.
I need to hear this every time a new email lands in my inbox.
I need to hear this every time I'm tempted to click the "Save to read later" button in my browser.
I need to hear this every time I think "I might want this in the future someday."
With rare exceptions, everything we have (physically or digitally) was somehow important or valuable to us at one point. We didn't delete it (or throw it away) the moment it arrived because it was subjectively worth our time, attention, and/or limited storage space.
Aside from those things we use regularly or keep for sentimental reasons, the passing of time tends to reduce whatever subjective value we place on our possessions (or data). In other words: the longer we've had something, the less we care about it. This is true for items stored in an garage, attic, or storage unit, and equally true for files sitting on a hard drive, flash drive, or other media.
There are many factors involved in calculating subjective value for our data. Most of these are subconscious, and most (unless we are very adept and honest) are impossibly optimistic. After all, the perceived cost of storing data is extremely low. It's easy, and data storage is cheap.
But simply having stuff weighs on you. Possessions require management. There are psychological costs, even to something as seemingly innocuous and cheap as a bit of digital data--which is probably why you're here reading this post.
So what do I mean by "set the bar high"?
Here's how I think of it:
- Certain categories of data are (subjectively) worth keeping. Others are not.
- Any data that falls below the threshold of "worth keeping" should be deleted.
- The higher the threshold is, the more you get to delete.
I appreciate charts and graphs as much as the next nerd, so here are two side-by-side charts to visualize this concept across a few arbitrary categories of data:
In case the graph labels are hard to read, which they probably are if you're looking this on a smartphone:
- The blue line is "Value" (your subjective assignment of worth)
- The red line is "Threshold" (how valuable something must be to keep)
- The gray area below the red line indicates what you get to delete
- The four categories from left to right are Photos, Personal Email, Work Email, and Random Downloads
These are arbitrary categories for the sake of the example, and in reality each of these would probably have their own subdivision of what you should or shouldn't keep. But you get the point.
My recommendation this week is to give yourself every excuse NOT to keep something. Get into the habit of deleting, not saving. Keeping important things is fine, of course, but be honest. Are you really going to need it later? Will you even remember it exists a year from now? A month? A week?
Specific guidelines are risky to prescribe since everyone's situation is unique. But for a rule of thumb, it's helpful to try tying anything you keep to a SMART goal: force yourself to think of something Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound to do with the data. If you can't, consider discarding it.
This is a tall order, I know. You don't have to stick to it perfectly. But if you practice it as an exercise, you'll likely start to think of data storage more conservatively in general.
Consequently, I've been deleting things left and right all week that I thought I might need to keep years ago. It turns out--surprise, surprise--I didn't.
Could I have known that up-front? Maybe not, at least not as clearly as I do now. But I could have been at least a little more conservative. Now, I get to spend more time dealing with what I could have handled faster way back then by not keeping it in the first place.
But here, too, is where the passage of time truly can have significance. That red "threshold" line tends to move upward on its own as the years go by. Something you thought you needed five years ago quite obviously falls below the line once you see it again and realize you haven't even thought about it, let alone done anything with it, for that entire five-year period.
While I've been applying this principle to my data hoard, it works just as well for a photo collection, archive of notes, bookmark collection, read-later list, and basically any other set of stuff you keep adding to because you "might need it later" for literally any reason.
I've heard from some of you on this topic in the last couple of weeks, but I'd love to learn more. Do you have anything like this to work through, and if so, how's it going? Have you noticed a similar pattern in your original desires and expectations vs. your current honest outlook? Reply and let me know!
Until next week, raise that bar a bit, and happy data-taming!