Angela Crocker - Declutter Your Data: Take Charge of Your Data and Organize Your Digital Life

Digital clutter is a fairly new problem. Our ancestors may have lived with too many objects but they didnt live with the same volume of information. By ancestors I mean our parents just one generation back. Some grew up with analog information and have had to adapt to digital living while others were born into the digital life. For both groups, digital clutter is an artifact of the Internet, personal computers, social networking, and smart devices. We now consciously create and unconsciously contribute to terabytes of data every year.

Our personal collection of data started slowly. With home and office computers, work previously done by hand or with typewriters and adding machines, moved into word processing and spreadsheet software. Files were stored on floppy disks and rudimentary hard drives. In 1993, there were about 600 websites. Early Internet adopters may have accessed those first websites, a few Bulletin Board System (BBS) message boards and, possibly, had an ICQ identity. I seek you, remember?

Flash forward and today we live with what Terry OReilly calls too much data smog. (This I Know: Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence), Knopf Canada, 2017). We have millions of websites and years worth of YouTube videos to watch plus social networking and cloud storage. Add to that our mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and smart home devices. We have vast search histories and medical, financial, and shopping digital records. And lets not forget any lingering remnants of data from our older collections of USB drives, SD cards, and defunct computers. Think back to when you first started using a computer. How much data have you created since then? How much information have you accessed? As R Ray Wang notes in his book Disrupting Digital Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), The volume of data we capture is already beyond human comprehension.

To quantify that data think in terabytes (TB). You know, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. The Register recently quoted a Western Digital Corporation finding that the average US household has 41.5 TB of data spread across 14 digital devices, and this is only going to grow (www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/wdc_home_nas_box/, accessed September, 2017). That 41.5 TB can hold more than 1 million hours of 1080 HD video or nearly 21 million digital photos of 2 MB each or trillions of pages of text. Thats just the average per household!

Unfortunately, as Nancy Collier observed in her book The Power of Off, (Sounds True, 2016), We spend a lot of our time just clearing the junk, which were now forced to do in order to discover anything we might actually care about. By sheer volume alone, Im certain everyone needs to do some data decluttering.