Happy Tuesday, everyone.
Before I get into today's topic, I wanted to share an article I stumbled upon late last week, which was an interesting follow-up to what I wrote to you all last Tuesday: Do this 10-minute routine before sleep for a healthier tomorrow. If you choose to read it, note that while the Tidy Tuesday newsletter didn't cover all of the steps in the pre-sleep routine he describes, I have actually employed all of them personally at different times in my life, and all of them were valuable. I particularly like the short journaling exercise.
Anyway...
The end of September has arrived, which means we're wrapping up the third quarter in 2025. Those of you keeping track will recall that it's therefore time to see how the current installment of the 2025 Consistency Challenge has gone.
To be honest, mine has been rather anti-climactic, and I think there are two reasons for this. First, back in July when I set out to establish that ideal family photo workflow with Immich and iCloud Photos Downloader, I had only a few specific and actionable tasks lined up for myself. I got the basic pieces working, tested the synchronization between our different photo sets, and then...just let it sit there while other things took priority. Not abandoned, exactly, but definitely not the consistent and measurable weekly progress I'd hoped for.
Second, the beginning of this quarter found me mid-PC-crisis, which didn't make for a very smooth start to a technology project. I didn't get solidly back into a "normal" workflow until almost the end of July.
So far, my 2025 consistency challenge results look like this:
- Q1 (Jan-Mar): Solid progress on the 4-million file archive cleanup
- Q2 (Apr-Jun): More solid progress on the 4-million file archive cleanup, but cut off early due to a PC crash in mid-June
- Q3 (Jul-Sep): Meager progress on improving family photo management processes
If you've been following along with the Consistency Challenge yourself, I hope your Q3 went better than mine. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes a project that seems urgent in July feels less critical by September. That's okay. The whole point of quarterly milestones is that we get to reassess and adjust. (At least, that's what I'm telling myself as I stare at these results.)
However, while I've been neglecting my official Q3 project, I've been spending quite a bit of mental energy on time management topics--the time audit discussion from June, and various explorations of how we actually spend our digital hours versus how we think we spend them. These topics feel important, and judging by the replies I've gotten, many of you found them useful too. But I'm aware that I've drifted away from the core "digital organization" topics that brought most of you here in the first place.
Time management and digital organization are certainly cousins; you need time to organize stuff, and good organization saves time. But they're not quite the same thing.
When I started Tidy Bytes, the focus was squarely on the practical, tangible aspects of managing our digital stuff: the photos, the files, the emails, the documents scattered across seventeen different cloud services that we swear we're going to consolidate someday. The fun stuff that keeps us up at night wondering if we'll ever find that tax document from 2019.
As we head into Q4, I want to get back to those hands-on, directly applicable digital organization topics. Not because the time management stuff isn't valuable, but because I suspect many of you have actual digital messes that need actual solutions, not just better theories about when to tackle them. I've done quite a bit of this in the past, so it's likely that some of what's coming up will feel familiar to some of you, but it bears repeating--even to me, because I get too deep in the digital weeds sometimes, too.
Rather than just assume I know what you need, I'd love to hear from you. What digital organization challenges are driving you up the wall right now? What topics would actually help you make progress on your digital chaos? Here are some possibilities I've been considering, but I'm completely open to other ideas:
- Cloud Consolidation: Practical strategies for those of us with data scattered across Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, and that one service we signed up for in 2018 and forgot about.
- Document Archaeology: How to actually deal with those folders labeled "Old Computer Backup 2016" that we're afraid to open but also afraid to delete.
- Password Management Migration: Moving from sticky notes and spreadsheets (you know who you are) to an actual password manager without losing your mind.
- Digital Estate Planning: The cheerful topic of making sure someone else can actually access your important stuff if needed, without giving them your passwords on a Post-it note labeled "In Case I Die."
- Email Archives: Diving into your50,000 emails to find what's actually worth keeping (spoiler: probably not much, but we should check).
Maybe you want something completely different. Maybe you're struggling with digital photos (again), or trying to figure out how to organize shared family documents, or wondering if anyone has actually successfully implemented a "scan everything" policy for paper documents.
I'm genuinely curious: what would be most helpful for you right now? leave a comment on this post and let me know. Even just a quick "I need help with X," without any other context, would be incredibly useful. If I get enough responses about a particular topic, that's where we'll start in October.
And speaking of October, I'm still deciding whether to carry the Q3 project forward and focus on photo management as a goal, or finally finish that archive cleanup project from Q1 and Q2 (remember the 2.4 million files still waiting for me?), or pick something fresh that might have more immediate impact. The beauty of the quarterly system is that we get these natural reset points. Use them!
We're now three quarters of the way through 2025. Three quarters of learning that consistency doesn't mean perfection, that progress doesn't always look like progress, and that sometimes the best thing we can do is acknowledge when something isn't working and adjust course.
Whether you crushed your Q3 goals or barely remember setting them, you're still here, still thinking about getting your digital life in order, and that counts for something. Tomorrow starts Q4, and with it, another chance to make progress on whatever digital organization challenge is weighing on you.
Let me know what topics would help you most. I'm here to write about what's useful, not just what I think might be interesting. Sometimes those overlap, but I'd rather err on the side of practical help.
Until next week, happy data-taming!