...at least, after all this time on the Tidy Tuesday mailing list, I hope you know what that means.
First, an update on my "family photo workflow upgrade" project: as a starting point I've got iCloud Photo Downloader automatically pulling in both constructive changes (new and edited photos) and destructive changes (deletions from the phone side). I learned that the "Personal Library" (just my photos) and "Shared Library" (photos that my wife and I can both manage) are treated separately, which means there's an extra step involved in syncing them, but I also have more flexibility. I don't yet have a good plan for syncing all of our photos exactly how we each prefer. I expect the most reliable method will be to treat her personal library, our shared library, and my personal library independently, and never auto-delete anything from her personal library no matter how old it is.
Stay tuned for further explanation as I work through this puzzle.
The Parallel Reset
Imagine that you have a mess of data to deal with: documents, emails, photos, notes, whatever. Maybe all of these things. (Or maybe you don't have to imagine it.)
You know it's a mess, and you know it could and should be organized better and that certain aspects of your day-to-day life would be simpler and easier if you could somehow manage to clean it up.
You even have some idea of how to do better, how to approach things differently so you aren't continuing to pile up such unwieldy digital chaos.
BUT...attacking the mess you've already acquired seems impossibly difficult. You don't have time to clean it up, even with a plan for how you might do it. Or, your idea for what to do instead just doesn't fit very well with everything you have so far.
Good news! You can try a parallel reset.
This is where you simply move, rename, hide, archive, or otherwise set aside your old way of managing your digital stuff without worrying about what happens with the old stuff in the short term. Instead, you start with a clean slate and your fresh set of ideas. It's a reset because you are starting over (sort of), and it's parallel because you're keeping your old system intact--you just aren't using it.
You can't really do this with stuff in the real world because there's no physical equivalent of an instant and painless digital archive. The closest you'd probably get is to rent out a storage unit and just move all of your disorganized junk into it. But I'm sure you'll agree that approach is far from ideal. Being able to do effectively the same thing in the digital world, instantly and at zero cost, is an often-overlooked shortcut that really helps.
I've talked about this a few times in the past. It's the entire strategy of the very first week of Tidy '24, Email Month's Archive Everything post. As I said then:
At first, it feels like cheating, but remember that this isn’t about sweeping things under the rug. Archiving all emails older than right now is not about pretending that email doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean you can’t go back and deal with that email later if you need to, or even if you want to. It’s about setting aside something that’s weighing you down so that you can build better habits in a space that makes it easy to do so.
In reality, even if you never get back to the old archive, you likely won't be worse off for having set it aside as-is to try a different (and hopefully better) approach. After all, what are your alternatives? You can keep doing what you're already doing, building more mess and wishing it were magically better. Or, you could actually delete everything so you don't have to worry about it at all (other than some form of regret if you lost something), but...why bother? Data storage is cheap. Archiving is painless. If you need to go back and search through your old and messy archives to find something, it won't be any harder than it is now. Your data won't decay into a worse state of mess if you leave it alone.
Basically, a parallel reset has almost no downside, while giving you the opportunity to improve things going forward with minimal effort. The only negative aspect is that you create a new subcategory of data to keep track of. But it's only one, and it's pretty obvious. Whatever organization system you use (folders for documents or photos, labels in Gmail, tags in any tag-supporting system), you just have one new category, such as:
- Archive 1
- Archive 2025
- Archive 2025-08-5
- Archive New System
...whatever makes sense (though choosing something date-stamped or incremental is probably best in case you do it again later). Everything you have gets moved without modification right into that folder (or label or tag), and you have a clean starting point for your new approach: fewer folders, more general categories, organizing by project instead of by person, whatever your new and better system entails.
Have any of you ever done this? If so, how did it work for you? I'd love to know--especially if it didn't work the way you expected. I've done it myself, and I know a couple of people who also did, though I've only followed up with one of them directly so far (it definitely helped in that case).
Until next week, enjoy the cooler weather--if you're in a part of the country currently experiencing it--and happy data-taming!