Cleaning out the digital closet

We’ve moved twice in the past year, and each moving event was preceded by a purge of old, unneeded stuff.

The first purge (we call it The August Putsch) helped us find new homes, or a final resting place, for a couple hundred books, some furniture, and a pile of old clothes. The second purge (The Glorious Revolution) allowed us to rid ourselves of most everything else, it seems. About 500 books went to Planned Parenthood for their annual book sale; a half-dozen sacks of clothes went to Goodwill; and we took advantage of living in a neighborhood to unload all but 6 pieces of furniture on the front lawn, all of which disappeared within seven minutes.

The result? Our new loft high above downtown Des Moines has only the books we want to own, only the clothes we wear, only the files we’re keeping for a reason, and only the cool furniture we purchased for it.

Pristine.

If only my digital abode were in such a state.

I listened to Peter Walsh’s book “It’s All Too Much” and felt all smug because I’ve overcome my need to accumulate stuff. (Walsh’s book, by the way, is excellent. Whether you’ve had to buy a second home to contain all your things, or you have a few piles of crap here and there, you’ll find lots of helpful advice inside.) It’s only been in the past week that I’ve realized I have an obsessive-compulsive habit of digital accumulation.

We all know the scientific rule-of-thumb of digital storage: it gets cheaper every time you turn around. I take more pictures, download more audio and video, generate more documents and emails, with no concern about filling up the available space. It’s all very well organized, filed, managed, tagged. Gigabytes of invaluable information, available at my fingertips.

Yet, how is this different from having a closet full of clothes I haven’t worn in five years? Or a thousand books I’ve either read or will never read? Just because it’s digital and fits on a 2.5″ hard drive, does that mean it’s not useless clutter?

Certainly, there are some things I need to save – financial documents, tax forms. A lot of my email is important for one reason or another. I don’t want to lose my photo collection or my iTunes library. But there’s another class of saved material that’s more about my psychological satisfaction with the idea of completeness; and when I look at my Finder from this perspective, it starts to get a little embarrassing.

I have all 118 episodes of the CBC Radio 3 podcast. I like the music, so I could argue that the nearly 120 hours of content is still valuable to me. However, I have only the latest 3 episodes in iTunes. The other 115 episodes are archived on a backup disk, which I never access for listening, only for backup. Now, if a meteor destroys the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, I’m ready to step forward with my priceless archive. But if I had 118 shirts that I never wore in a closet somewhere, I’d reach for a big plastic bag.

Improving search and tagging capabilities mean I have more control over my archive of 65,000+ emails. But what am I saving? A pivotal communication from a friend on June 22, 2002 reads: “OK.” To what question was that friend responding? Why, I have that email, too.

Space is cheap; online, it’s often free. So don’t throw anything away. Archive it.

What I’ve discovered as I’ve started “throwing out” gigabytes of stuff is that the result is the same as ridding one’s home of physical accumulation: a growing sense of well-being, a psychic burden lifted.

Some things, whether physical or digital, are meant to be used, enjoyed, admired for a time. Then the physical stuff can find a new home where it will be appreciated. When the digital stuff is no longer contributing to my life, the place for it is the trash bin.