Here we are at the end of another year. It's the last Tidy Tuesday of December, and it feels like a good moment to step back and look at what we covered over the past 12 months.
At the beginning of 2025, I kicked things off with a theme: the Year of Consistency. The idea was simple enough: pick one digital organization project per quarter, define a measurable goal, and work toward it at least once per week. No elaborate systems, no complex tracking, just regular effort in a specific direction.
The whole point was to prove that consistent small actions could accomplish more than sporadic bursts of motivation followed by months of nothing. And, for the most part, it worked. But there were definitely some hiccups.
Q1: The Great Archive Cleanup Begins
I started the year with a project that had haunted me for ages: cleaning up decades of archived data scattered across twenty-plus hard drives and other media. Old backups of backups of backups, copies of drives from computers I hadn't used since the early 2000s, and an embarrassing number of duplicate files.
The goal was ambitious—collect everything onto a single triage drive and cut my file count in half. I had roughly 4.6 million files to work through.
By the end of March, I'd gathered everything into one place and deleted about 830,000 files during the culling process. That wasn't quite the 2.3 million I'd hoped to eliminate, but the consistency part worked beautifully. I made progress almost every single week, which was infinitely more than I'd accomplished in the ten months prior. Or even ten years prior, honestly.
Along the way, I discovered WizTree (a blindingly fast disk visualization tool), used FreeFileSync to wrangle massive sync operations, and learned the hard way that you shouldn't run deduplication too aggressively before properly categorizing your data. I had to re-sync a bunch of source files after getting ahead of myself.
Q2: Continuing the Slog (With Interruptions)
For Q2, I kept working on the same archive project. There was still so much to do, and I was finally in a rhythm.
Then my desktop PC's motherboard died.
That particular adventure ate up most of a week and reminded me how much I depend on my primary workstation. Fortunately, my data was fine, since good backups meant I just had to swap in replacement parts and pick up where I'd left off.
By late June, I'd pushed through to about 44% overall progress and gotten surprisingly close to my original goal of halving the file count. The remaining 2.4+ million files still felt daunting, but the hardest part—gathering everything and establishing a working process—was behind me.
I also wrote about some unexpected joy during this phase: rediscovering nostalgic digital artifacts from my childhood. Old BASIC programs I'd typed in from Usborne books when I was eight. Scans of family photos from the 90s. Music files I hadn't thought about in decades. Digging through old archives turned out to be more than just tedious work; sometimes I'd stumble across something and spend ten minutes just remembering.
Q3: Pivoting to Photos
By July, I was ready for a change of pace. The archive project wasn't finished, but I'd been doing one thing for six months and wanted to tackle something different.
Enter: family photo workflow optimization.
My wife and I had been struggling with our photo management situation for years. Different workflows, different preferences, different devices, and a shared desire to actually have our family photos organized and accessible. I'd been experimenting with Immich (a self-hosted Google Photos alternative) and iCloud Photos Downloader, hoping to build something that would work for both of us.
This project was less about raw file counts and more about figuring out the right combination of tools and processes. It involved a lot of testing, some configuration headaches, and ongoing conversations with my wife to make sure whatever I built would actually work for her too.
And, shockingly, my motherboard (or, technically, my CPU) died again in June. Different cause, same result: more weeks of limping along on my old laptop, waiting for warranty repairs, and wondering if I should just buy backup hardware to have on hand.
I wrote a whole newsletter about that: about having "hardware backups" the same way we think about data backups. It's not something most people need to worry about, but it sure would have saved me some stress. Not having a working main system made the transition from my Q2 project to my Q3 project harder to navigate.
Q4: Document Migration and Reflection
For the final quarter, I took on something different: helping my mom migrate her substantial collection of Word documents into a proper note-taking system. She's accumulated years of notes, meeting records, research, and task lists across hundreds of files in a complex folder structure. The goal was to move everything into something purpose-built for knowledge management, with backlinks and better organization.
I initially planned to use Craft, which has a beautiful interface and the features I thought she'd need. Then I discovered a bug in one of its core features that made setup impossible on Windows. The Craft team confirmed the issue but couldn't give me a timeline for a fix, so I pivoted to a pre-configured Obsidian installation instead. It's more powerful (and more complicated) than Craft, but I was confident I could set it up in a way that would be simple enough for her to use without getting lost in the flexibility.
This project was less about measurable file counts and more about figuring out the right workflow. I spent time exploring how to classify and organize documents, even building a proof-of-concept tool using local AI to help analyze and categorize files. My mom and I worked through some trial runs together, creating entries in Obsidian and exploring how a "flatter" organization structure might work for her.
Progress was slower than I'd hoped, partly because the project depended on coordinating the schedule of two independently busy people and partly because life kept getting in the way—travel, illness, and other important projects. But we made a solid start, and the groundwork is there to continue into the new year.
What Actually Worked
Looking back, here's what I took away from the 2025 Consistency Challenge:
Specific goals matter. "Organize my archives" is almost meaningless. "Reduce my file count from 4.6 million to 2.3 million" is something I can actually measure and work toward.
Weekly action keeps momentum alive. Even the weeks where I made minimal progress (or no progress at all), having a defined project waiting for me made it easy to jump back in. I never lost track of what I was supposed to be doing.
Switching projects quarterly is about right. Long enough to make real progress, short enough to avoid burnout. I could have stuck with the archive cleanup all year, but pivoting to photos in Q3 kept things fresh.
Life will interrupt you anyway. Two motherboard failures, holiday travel, busy seasons at work—there's always something. The structure of "at least once per week" gave me permission to have lighter weeks without feeling like I'd failed.
Accountability helps. Reporting my progress to all of you every week kept me honest. There's nothing quite like knowing you'll have to admit "zero progress this week" to motivate you to do something.
A Few Notable Topics from 2025
Beyond the Consistency Challenge itself, we covered a lot of ground this year. A few highlights:
Q1, January-March:
-
WizTree and disk visualization (January) — Still one of my favorite tools for getting a quick picture of where storage is going.
-
File syncing with FreeFileSync (January) — Invaluable for large data migrations, especially when you need to handle errors gracefully.
-
The nostalgia factor (March) — Sometimes the best motivation for archive work is stumbling across memories you forgot you had.
-
Eating a digital elephant (March) — How do you tackle an overwhelming project? With a specific plan and consistent effort.
Q2, April-June:
-
Immich for self-hosted photos (April/July) — A promising Google Photos alternative for those of us who prefer to keep our data under our own control.
-
Folders are not dead (May) — A rebuttal to the "just use tags and search" crowd. There's still a place for hierarchical organization.
-
AI and data organization (May) — Some early thoughts on where AI might help and where it probably shouldn't.
-
Time audits (June) — A simple but revealing exercise: track what you actually do versus what you think you do.
Q3, July-September:
-
Hardware backups (July) — When your computer dies, do you have a fallback plan?
-
The seven folder system (July) — A simple rule of thumb: no more than seven folders per level, no more than three levels deep.
-
Blurred context and lost focus (July) — Why it's so hard to do deep work when every task happens on the same device in the same chair.
-
Read-later tools (August) — How to conquer the fear of losing something important without keeping 47 browser tabs open.
-
Phishing refresher (August) — The scammers never stop, so neither should your vigilance.
-
Tidying Tidy Bytes (August) — Even someone who writes about organization needs to organize their own stuff sometimes.
- When "later" comes for read-later apps (September) — How to actually find time to process your queue, including "barnacle habits."
- Routine triggers redux (September) — Attaching new behaviors to things you already do, like deleting photos while your computer boots.
- The Ivy Lee method (and ignoring it) (September) — The $500k productivity advice I wasn't following, with a 106-day average procrastination count to prove it.
Q4, October-December:
- Breaking up with Word documents (October) — Why Word is the wrong tool for notes and knowledge management.
- Writing for yourself vs. someone else (October) — A simple decision tree for when to use Word vs. a notes app.
- Notes migration conundrums (October) — A Craft bug derails my mom's migration, and the challenge of picking the "right" notes app.
- Proof-of-concept AI organizer (October) — Early experiments with local AI-assisted document classification.
- Why are you keeping this stuff? (November) — The most important question in data organization.
- Make starting easy (November) — James Clear's insight that motivation increases after you begin.
- Action requires clarity (November) — Why unclear next steps lead to procrastination.
- December Digital Reset series (December) — Quick end-of-year cleanup tasks for your phone, photos, email, and filesystem.
That's...actually a ton of stuff, isn't it? If you're interested in revisiting or learning more about any of those topics, just leave a comment and let me know. I love knowing what's important to you.
What's Next
One thing I noticed as the year wore on: I started writing about the meta aspects of digital organization more than the nuts-and-bolts how-to stuff. Topics like context switching and lost focus. The importance of your physical workspace. How mess accumulates slowly even when you have good systems in place. The debate over whether folders are dead. These are interesting to me, and hopefully to you, but I know some of you might prefer the concrete instructions over the philosophical discussions.
After three years of weekly newsletters, I'm feeling a bit stretched sometimes. Crafting unique, novel, and genuinely useful content every week has gotten harder, because I remember what I've already covered, and I want to avoid being redundant. I don't want to just rehash things I've already said, and I don't want to pad out newsletters with filler just to maintain a schedule.
So I'm considering a shift—pulling back from weekly to something closer to monthly. I don't have an exact plan concerning timing, but I want to give you a heads-up about the adjustment. I'd rather send fewer newsletters that are actually worth reading than keep up a pace that dilutes the quality.
Whatever 2026 looks like for Tidy Bytes, the core philosophy isn't going anywhere:
- Small wins are the best
- Consistency over intensity
- Progress over perfection
And, as always, the easiest data to organize is the data you don't have in the first place.
Thank you for sticking with me through another year. Whether you've been here since the beginning or just joined recently, I appreciate every one of you who takes the time to read these Tuesday emails.
Here's to a tidier 2026—at whatever pace makes sense.
Happy data-taming!