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Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter, Research Suggests (bbc.com)
Emerging research on digital hoarding -- a reluctance to get rid of the digital clutter we accumulate through our work and personal lives -- suggests that it can make us feel just as stressed and overwhelmed as physical clutter. From a report: Not to mention the cybersecurity problems it can cause for individuals and businesses and the way it makes finding that one email you need sometimes seem impossible. The term digital hoarding was first used in 2015 in a paper about a man in the Netherlands who took several thousand digital photos each day and spent hours processing them. "He never used or looked at the pictures he had saved, but was convinced that they would be of use in the future," wrote the authors.
In a study published earlier this year Neave and his colleagues asked 45 people about how they deal with emails, photos, and other files. The reasons people gave for hanging on to their digital effects varied -- including pure laziness, thinking something might come in handy, anxiety over the idea of deleting anything and even wanting "ammunition" against someone. The team has used those responses to develop a questionnaire to assess digital hoarding behaviours in the workplace, and have tested it with 203 people who use computers as part of their job. Their findings show that email appears to be a particular problem: among participants, the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
In a study published earlier this year Neave and his colleagues asked 45 people about how they deal with emails, photos, and other files. The reasons people gave for hanging on to their digital effects varied -- including pure laziness, thinking something might come in handy, anxiety over the idea of deleting anything and even wanting "ammunition" against someone. The team has used those responses to develop a questionnaire to assess digital hoarding behaviours in the workplace, and have tested it with 203 people who use computers as part of their job. Their findings show that email appears to be a particular problem: among participants, the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
The new stuff is much better. Thicker cocks, ropier cum, bigger gape.
Are they missing few decimal places with the emails? Those 92000 emails I have in just one of my inboxes are for just a couple of last few years. Do I have a problem? :)
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
My old yahoo e-mail has over 100k unread e-mail that I couldn't care less about. At work I simply read the five or so e-mails I get each day when they come in as it has minimal impact on my job. Any detailed discussions are usually via chat, phone or in person as real time conversations tend to work best.
As to read e-mail, work dictates that we archive all e-mail with our customers in case of contract disputes. With my personal e-mail, none of the providers are telling me I'm running out of space and searching for old e-mails takes far less time than sorting through all of the half legit/spam e-mails each day. Keeping everything is the most efficient use of my time.
It's not a problem until I hit the 15 GB free limit
They're computers! We leave shit on them all the time, because WHO CARES? Hell, Microsoft announced that with the next update, it's going to pre-hoard 7GB of hard drive space for future updates.
Hard drive space is, basically, virtual space anyway (hard drives stay the same size but they can hold more data every year, actually hard drives are getting smaller), so why would anyone compare hoarding physical things to not purging files that aren't in the way anyway, and may very well be useful later.
There's zero gain in deleting files, unless you're in a crunch for space that's needed for some actual important issue at the moment, or those files are going to cost you something if someone finds them.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Just like the president's IQ.
Simply not deleting digital files is not the same as the physical world.
There's no reason to delete files. Emails are all archived. My inbox has 40,000 non-spam emails - the last 12 months. It's there because it's searchable, and information is more worthwhile than spending time getting rid of anything.
Feeling the need to carefully sort and archive is another matter, completely separate from just archiving.
4chan's the only way I can experience firsthand the problems Windows has with handling large numbers of files.
My email archive does come in handy from time to time, and most of the time it's just stowed away in a folder not taking up much space. How in the world is that supposed to stress me? Physical clutter gets in the way, I get that, but emails?
>> Emerging research on digital hoarding -- a reluctance to get rid of the digital clutter we accumulate through our work and personal lives -- suggests that it can make us feel just as stressed and overwhelmed as physical clutter.
Nice try Windows 10 Disk Cleanup. I saw your other article about needing 7GB on my machines today.
For me the winning move is just to change jobs every few years. "All those emails I never answered? F' 'em. Clean inbox and a raise here I come!"
There's no way 2015 was the first time the term "digital hoarding" was used. It shows up in Google Trends as far back as 2008 and the Wikipedia entry for the topic was created in early 2014.
Yes, I still play. It's interesting to see other players who get trapped in a sort of hoarding mentality with extra toons that don't actually have any meta-game practicality. I think the publisher actually relies on this to sell coins so that players will buy more bag space.
With physical hoarding, the burden is often eventually shifted onto family or friends. They are stuck with the expense and effort of a major clean-out if the hoarder ever dies or becomes incapacitated.
With digital hoarding, everything that was accumulated often fits into a shirt pocket. While it may stress out the actual hoarder, those who inherit it could easily dispose of it if they choose.
1.) Digital space is cheaper than physical space.
2.) The cost of digital space is decreasing with time because it's practically infinite.
3.) The cost of physical space is increasing with time because it's finite.
4.) Search functions are excellent, if you tag things correctly and/or use the right search terms, finding one email in millions takes seconds. Much easier than searching for things in physical space (which is why warehouses have digital records of where everything is).
Therefore no need to worry about digital hoarding. Everyone stop stressing. Problem solved, go home, get off my lawn.
Having thousands to millions of emails isn't about digital hoarding. It is being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unimportant, irrelevant, expired, and useless spam, and simply being unable to manage it.
Say you get a bill in your email. That bill needs to be retained for a certain period of time in order to retain the latest contact/support information, balance the checkbook, and account for any errors with the billing agency or bank. Simply deleting that bill assumes perfection and/or inerrancy on the part of third parties.
Let those bills grow for some time, and suddenly you've got an entire folder of bills, intermingled with data breach notifications and administrative emails, etc. There may be an email or two which you need to "Pin" to the folder to prevent its deletion. And then do a "Sweep" or automated cleanup of other items to prevent clutter. Mail hasn't been that advanced until recently, and most mail services are still not that advanced. (Is GMail capable of all of those things?)
Later you buy one thing online, and suddenly you have inadvertently subscribed to 50 publications which email frequently. (Plus paper catalogs by snail mail apparently,...) Which you then have to manage which ones you have unsubscribed to while sorting and deleting them to prevent deletion of legitimate mail in your Inbox (like a first warranty renewal notification for a product, or an insurance bill from a new provider, or account theft alerts/purchase notifications you weren't expecting etc...).
Let that cycle repeat itself for all online activity, which is intertwined with a significant portion of our daily lives, and email becomes a task which requires a full time secretary position to maintain. Training email is now possible, but it is not a simple task. Then put all of that on the general populace who can't even change their Facebook diary postings from "Everyone/Public" to Friends or a private group, etc,...
It ain't hoarding, its giving up!
Saved to Library!
Will feel better when they stop digital hoarding.
I'm stressed too, but for a different reason. My only family is my brother; we don't get along and he didn't even invite me over for Christmas :(. I live alone in a studio apartment, I'm 50 and I've never had a girlfriend and nobody really cares if I live or I die :(... My entire social life is a Youtube channel nobody watches and a technology website where I am a walking joke.
I have a dead-end job, and when I try to get little side-lines going like ebooks or Amazon referral links or silver coins, they show a tiny bit of promise but never really amount to anything :(...
Nothing seems to work out for me.
Apple Music reduces tons of clutter. Just stream what I actually want to listen to right now. Moreover, I pay for the few movies or audiobooks I want. This means I'm more likely to actually watch it rather than just move it to an external and forget about it.
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
I only have 188 in my inbox now, all read. That is just Dec1 to date (Jan 8).
Everything else is saved off off by year/month (YYYY-MM for proper sorting), including my sent-mail in the same fashion.
Mine go back to 2002, I am not sure how many there are exactly. But I use fetchmail to pull in several accounts locally so it is fairly complete.
I use alpine for email, and can easily grep my archives to find something/someone if I need to, which does occur.
I don't consider it hoarding, it's saving. All of those emails take up 3.5 GB of space, which is nothing, and it's only 2.3 GB in a zipped archive. I have a cron job to back them up nightly. It takes really a very minute amount of effort to do that.
Now pictures/videos are a bit tougher, but just because of the amount of space they require. Especially since my wife started doing digital photography and saving RAW images as well. It's only minimally more work to keep good backups using some rsync scripts.
We have gone back and done some purging though, it's good and healthy to do that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I think the world lost something in moving away from skewmorphic icons for boring bauhaus styling.
as this shows there is a deep psychological mapping from real desktops to virtual ones.
This is not a surprise as many parts of the brain that do modern processing are just adaptation of things never intended for the purpose and as a result have advantages when new problems are cast in the old frameworks the neurons are actually organized for.
Apple's new UI feature "stacks" actually gathers all the shit in a folder ort desktop and tries to organize it into logical piles like an admiistrative assitant might. Nice idea. Now where did my admin put that file i needed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
About 7T. I will go thorough them one of these days...
I have 2 Netgear NAS 4 bay boxes each with 40+ Tb and 3 Netgear NAS 2 bay boxes all filled with 5Tb drives and I still need more space... Talk about hording bits... I am a bit horder, I have admitted I was powerless over bits– and that my NAS boxes have become unmanageable.
If a bit of uncataloguged cruft on your storage is going to destroy your brain then you must be a bit of a snowflake. Smart human beings can cope with web sites like this https://viralzone.expasy.org/ and remember vast swathes of it. Check in your nerd card right now if your personal data has beaten you.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I have a few directories filled with stuff I've found around the internet over the years. I do this to relieve stress though, and I'm fairly confident that it works in this capacity. The problem is that when I find something cool or insightful I don't want to just click past and forget about it, the instinct is that I want to preserve it somehow. Often with the idea that I'll show it to someone else at some point in the future and get points for being the person who knew about this cool or insightful thing. Making me cool by association.
This is dumb, but it nonetheless causes me some stress. Often what happens is I'll have Cool Thing in a tab for a very long time (I have hundreds of tabs), and I keep seeing it and thinking I should close that tab, but... you know, that thing is really pretty cool. Hoarding is my way of getting rid of it, putting it out of my mind. Once I save it somewhere then I no longer have to worry about losing it when I close the tab. It's safely stored away, just in case, and I'm free to move on to something else.
When I run out of space I take the oldest half of emails and send to archive. How much time does it take cleaning up every day?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Now you're calling my 2TB "Homework folder" by the name of "digital hoarding"? I'm just saving on network bandwidth!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Does anyone have the full set from 1989?
There have been initiatives to 'archive life' at places like MIT and Microsoft. I think it is an interesting phenomena that now we can keep vast amounts of personal information, images, video's etc. for historical purposes and the use in family archives.
Certainly my grandchildren will be able to know a lot more about who I was then I know about any of my grandparents or great grandparents.
97879947
How in the hell do I organize that in a reasonable amount of time?
"Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter,"
(Closes the tab to https://www.techradar.com/news...)
(Quietly sets down the 4TB external drive he was considering to add to the other three...)
Oh?...I....um, ok, nevermind.
-Styopa
It doesn't matter what it is, they always think it will be of use in the future.
I have reports, projects, and other fun things from when I was in high school using 8080 and 8088 computers. I have college projects and other clutter I keep to this day. It reminds me of what I did and where I came from. The longer I keep it the smaller the storage medium gets for that stuff. I could stuff them all on a thumb drive if I wanted including my MIDI collection.
Increases stress? Pffff!
The NSA and even Google must feel extremely high-stress then
Sure you can all laugh, but one day my hoards of poisonous potatoes will be worth more than diamond!
"In a study published earlier this year Neave and his colleagues asked 45 people about how they deal with emails, photos, and other files."
That's hardly statistically significant given the large population of users of computer systems. They should have been able to easily survey a few thousand people, not a paltry 45.
For me, I delete emails, don't take pictures, and organize my files. I also backup my data in at least three places.
$ mv ~/* ~/.unseen
From the article:
Some think that because they’ve enabled it, tech companies should help fix our digital hoarding tendencies. Sedera believes there will soon be platform-agnostic ways of indexing and curating all our data across devices, similar to how the contacts on your phone sync across apps.
Nope. I don't need yet more people telling me to get rid of stuff because they feel it's not important to me. I'm fed up with minimal UIs taking control and options away from me to improve my experience.
My data doesn't hurt or clutter anyone else's life, so give me decent searching tools and GTFO.
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