I’ve been working to purge junk from my home and my office. And while it’s a pretty daunting task, at least I can see the mess AND I—and my friends and relatives—can see the rewards of my labor. However, the files on my computer might be a different story. I’m pretty sure I am guilty of keeping a lot of junk I just don’t need.
Are you a digital pack rat?
- Do you save every attached photo that your friends send?
- Do you save the funny emails you get?
- Do you have several copies of the same file because you didn’t really know where to put it so you put several copies in different places?
- Is your computer desktop littered with icons for programs you don’t use and files you were working on a year ago?
My new computer has a 100 gig hard drive AND I have a 30 gig external drive as well. So I can save EVERYTHING! But man, I know that when those drives begin to fill up with mp3s and programs I thought I’d try and junk I seem to imagine I need, it will take a life time to weed it down to a manageable size.
A filing system is the place to start
I have a pretty good system of folders to keep track of my files. The list of top level folders should be short enough so that when I want to open a file I only have one screen of the top choices. So My Documents has one folder each for:
- ACO
- marketing (for my businesses)
- clients
- speaking
- websites
- writing projects
- junk folder where I store stuff I just need for a minute and plan to delete shortly.
- Odds and Ends folder where I keep tiny little things I need often–the template to print mailing labels for forwarding mail to each of my kids, directions to relatives houses, a couple recipes that I get asked for often.
Each of those folders has several folders inside them. For example, I manage several websites so in the master website folder is another one for each of the sites. I work on several projects for the ACO so there are subfolders for the upcoming convention, one for last year’s conference (there is some stuff there I know I’ll need again), one for the bylaws project, etc.
However, I know there is a lot of stuff I’ve saved that I really don’t need so I was interested to find this article at ZenHabits.net, A three step cure for digital pack rats and how to know if you’re one of them.
Think about this:
- What files do you really need over and over? How much junk are you storing?
- Have you ever gone through your bookmarks or favorites files to clear out links that don’t work any more? Do you really need to keep copies of stuff that’s available on the internet?
- What plan could you make to clean out what you don’t need? Remember the bigger your hard drive the longer the process will take. You’ll be amazed at how much time can just go away while you check through these files.
Good luck with all this. I’m afraid I’ll be digging through my files til Easter!
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Kerch:
I’m so grateful for this article. I’m guilty for practicing this behavior. I’ve gone beyond counting my fingers and toes,the number of times
(I’ve crashed my system).
This article just may save me, and I love ACO.