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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 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.
More important than the volume is the cost. The cost of storing it, the cost of finding the mail you want.
Storage is cheap. Finding stuff depends on the quality of your search system, or how much time you invest in organizing.
Unlike physical clutter, digital clutter doesn't necessarily mean you can't find what you want near the bottom of the pile.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
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.
More important than the volume is the cost. The cost of storing it, the cost of finding the mail you want. Storage is cheap. Finding stuff depends on the quality of your search system, or how much time you invest in organizing.
I try to look at it from an efficiency standpoint, if I can spend one hour now organizing to save ten hours searching later then I organize. If it's ten hours to save one hour I don't. My conclusion is that as long as you don't have an obvious need for it in the future and you got a timeline it's best to just leave it be and see if you ever need to spend any time on it at all. If you do need to spend the time though, throw away everything you for sure don't need. If it's a couple years old that's probably a lot of it, sometimes I do this with a pile of old papers and in the end I might have two or three keepers. It's not really worth organizing as much as it's just taking out the trash. Other than that just put it in an "old" folder in the corner of your multi-TB drive. Unlike physical clutter it doesn't take up any living space, it doesn't collect dust, rot or grow mold, it's not a fire hazard... it's just a near invisible, near free, near infinite storage space.
I mean it's different if you're like trying to archive the internet and intentionally make huge libraries and stuff, like you want to be your own mini-Netflix or mini-Spotify. But for the average person I think those who don't keep such a pile of their documents are the strange ones, like they got some neat freak thing about having a big number somewhere like it somehow matters. I do care about the number of incoming mails, because I do have to spend time reading them or at the very least decide not to read them. But whether there's a hundred or a million mails in the archive doesn't bother me one bit. I think that's some strange hold-over from the physical world, like a whole diary is a lot of text but it's still extremely little data. The whole library of Congress is about ~15TB of data, I could mirror it. And there'd still be more clutter on my bookshelf.
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