Cleaning out the Digital Closet, part 2

Two or three people commented to me about the post I wrote on pulling the plug on massive email archives. Yes, not two, but perhaps as many as three commented. (I don’t remember.)

Given that outpouring of response, I thought I’d give you an update. But first, a recap: in September, I determined that my vital archive of around 65,000 emails – maintained for so many years on laptop after laptop, then carefully uploaded using IMAP to GMail where it could live in the cloud, safe from catastrophic loss, then backed up on a second GMail account because one can never be too careful – was really just a useless waste of space – even when it’s Google’s space.

I began the rampant deletion of email; in total, I round-filed about 50,000 emails; my current trove, once again living on my hard drive, numbers about 15,000 emails.

For 4 weeks, the trashed emails lived on in Gmail purgatory; this week, they reached their 30 day limit and disappeared forever. What’s the impact? Well, in the first 2 weeks after trashing them, I made somewhere between three and five visits to the Gmail trashbin to search for something I needed. That’s not exactly an overwhelming endorsement for the Vital Email party, is it?

I’m not going to pretend that getting rid of the email has helped me feel whole again or achieve defined, meaty abs… but the point is getting rid of clutter. I have come to believe that clutter impedes energy, and without getting all Deepak Chopra on you, I think that having less clutter frees the mind.

Want to know my cheat? The backup Gmail account? It still exists, with all 65,000+ emails. It’s going to be my safety net and in 6 months, I’m going to delete those copies, too.

It’s worth delving into this concept of “safety net” for a minute. Why did I keep all that email? A variety of reasons; for instance, I would probably save lint if one could easily mount it in a scrapbook. But my biggest reason was that those email messages contained information that I was afraid of forgetting or losing or not having. Yes, most emails we get or send consist of the response “OK, see you soon!” but a fair number contain information vital to our work or life.

For a long time, keeping the emails has been my haphazard way of holding on to that information. I say haphazard because, although it’s “all in there,” you have to dig through the haystack to get to it. I’m slowly but surely trading in the “keep it all” approach for a new method: process the inbox every day, harvest all the important actionable or reference information out of the email, and get into a trusted system where I can see it, synthesize it, create tasks around it, delegate it or defer it.

I don’t throw away all the email. For work, there’s some stuff I have to keep. There’s also some stuff I just want to keep. That’s fine, but the reason I’m now keeping it is because the email itself is a document that has value. All the usable information locked away in it, however, has been lifted out and transported to another system that I use daily to track my tasks and projects.

I won’t pretend that it’s working perfectly; I won’t win Miss GTD. In fact, I’ve discovered an early warning sign of stressful periods – I start putting every email I get in the archive box and neglecting the data mining. But the system seems a lot smarter and when it’s working, it leaves me feeling more relaxed.