Welcome to another Tidy Tuesday.
Today's content is once again inspired by my experience this past week with my own 2025 consistency challenge project. Here's how my progress looks this time around:
- I deleted 3,207 files comprising ~28 GB
- I sorted 21,006 files comprising ~693 GB (!!!)
- Overall progress: 19% (from 18% last week) ...but there's a caveat here...
You might notice that I sorted an enormous quantity of data (693 GB), but my progress barely moved. This is because the file count was relatively small (21k), meaning the average size of each sorted file was much larger than usual. There were a lot of videos this time around, and videos are some of the largest files any of us deal with. But I've been reporting progress based on file counts rather than raw data size. If I measure progress in bytes instead of in files, then I moved from 41% to a whopping 51% complete!
It's hard to say which metric is more "fair" for what I'm doing. Counting files reflects my effort better, since as I dig through the archives, I'm working with files rather than raw bytes (which would be utterly impossible). Still, I'm glad to know that I made a huge dent in the overall quantity of data.
Let It Go
Now that all of you have a Disney song stuck in your head, I want to tie those three words to data organization.
Tidy Bytes is about practicing good personal digital data management: cleaning up and avoiding digital mess and the stress that goes along with it. At the highest conceptual level, the absolute easiest way to keep your digital life organized is to have no data at all. Poof, gone. Nothing.
Of course, that's neither practical nor desirable for most of us. It's like keeping a clean house by not buying any furniture, rugs, dishes, or decorations. Yes, it's easy to manage, but where do you eat? Where do you sleep? What can you do there?
So, you work to find a balance where you acquire and keep only the things that actually serve to make your life better, to achieve your desired level of utility and comfort while not going overboard to the point where maintenance is overwhelming. Because, as we all clearly recognize in the physical world, possessions require both storage and maintenance. Space is limited, and entropy is relentless.
In the digital world, the same rules apply, just less obviously. Your data still requires storage and maintenance. You don't generally have to deal with all of the same issues as you would with a vehicle or appliance--oil changes, washing, and so on--but other common tasks remain:
- Organize it logically so you can retrieve it when needed
- Remember what you have and where it is
- Use it from time to time in some helpful or enjoyable way
Those of you who follow Tidy Bytes have likely felt the psychological pressure that comes from having more data than you feel able to manage easily, whether in the form of emails, photos, documents, bookmarks, notes, browser tabs, personal archives, or some combination of those.
Is any of that data going anywhere by itself? No. Is it actually doing anything to you, other than existing? No. But it can still cause stress, because having it at all means you feel required to do something with it. After all, nobody else is going to, right?
So, just...let it go.
I don't mean to let everything go. But most of us--myself absolutely included--hold onto more than we should. Maybe we're afraid of what will happen if a certain bit of data disappears, so we keep it "just in case." Maybe we plan to read something later, but "something" is ten times more than we have time for and "later" never comes anyway. The time we might have spent attacking our backlog of material is instead spent gathering still more to consume later.
Before ubiquitous internet, magical glass rectangles in everyone's pocket, and push notifications--a trifecta of distraction, if there ever was one--managing the inflow of data into our lives was certainly easier. I'm far too much of a computer nerd to pine for a tech-free world, but the effect this constant firehose of immediately accessible information has had on us is undeniable and certainly not all positive. Acknowledging this can help us make better decisions.
As I've been slogging through my archives for the past four months, I've shifted my perspective more and more towards letting go of the data I feel (often irrationally) attached to. Each week, I'm more and more willing to delete rather than rearrange. Huge sets of files that I kept because doing so felt like a security blanket at the time have turned into something closer to a smothering trap that I'm only too happy to escape.
Every time I raise the bar for what's important enough to keep, it feels a little scary. But when I actually press the delete button five seconds after making that decision, it's liberating. Not once have I regretted it. On the contrary, it makes me more likely to push even further next time I feel hesitation.
One fun side-effect of having very strict requirements for what to keep is that the stuff I actually do keep is automatically very meaningful in one way or another. My favorite find this past week--and possibly for the whole project so far--is a collection of journal entries spanning four years, which I'd stored in a simple text file. I spent half an hour reading through parts of it and enjoying myself immensely. Here's an excerpt from an entry in early 2014:
I'm sitting in the back of an Audi which apparently has its own wifi hotspot, on the road between the Kuopio airport in central Finland and the hotel in Tahko where the Bluegiga global meeting is being held this January. I'm actually connected through my iPhone (which has a Saunalahti SIM in it), since the car's network is secure, and I don't know if it's an internet gateway anyway. It's dark, well below freezing, and I'm in the middle of nowhere, and yet I'm still warm, comfortable, and online.
Technology is amazing.
I remember this clearly. It felt almost impossible to me in the moment, enough to marvel about it in writing. I was a straggler arriving on that trip since I was one of the only US-based employees of that company at the time, so I ended up in my own taxi from the airport rather than being with a group of coworkers. The whole trip was enjoyable, but that moment still pops back into my mind from time to time. It has nothing to do with data organization, but I still wanted to share it for fun.
Do you think you could find some way to let data go this week? Delete something you don't need, or simply not save something you feel tempted to? The more you practice this, the more you will steer your digital life towards low-maintenance behavior.
Technology is amazing, and our access to information is equally so. Just keep the potential downsides in mind as well as the incredible benefits. Practice making choices that add value, not stress.
Until next week, happy data-taming!