Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips and Personal Productivity Tools

When it comes to organizing the physical world, there is no doubt that less clutter is better. But, in the world of bits and bytes, the same rules do not apply. Digital is different.

If it’s digital, keep it — no questions asked.

On the computer, aspire to be a digital pack rat and keep everything. Why save everything, not just the ‘useful’ things? Two reasons:

1. Making decisions costs time and effort. Digital storage costs neither. Small as it may be, there is a mental burden in determining if something is worth saving. Asking ‘Will I need this again?’ forces you to predict the future. That is a waste of mental CPU cycles and an ultimately futile activity. As of this writing, a fancy-pants 1 Terabyte drive costs $120. That’s 6 ten-thousandths of a cent per photograph and 5 ten millionths of a cent per email. Given the acceleration of information technology even your largest, high-definition hours-long 3d hologram home videos will soon reach near-zero storage costs. Storage is a non-problem: keep everything.
2. It’s impossible to determine what the useful things are. The value of information changes over time in impossible to predict ways. That email you receive today doesn’t hold any immediate value, but it may be priceless in the future.

I’ll give you my favorite example of my own digital pack-rattery proving to be invaluable. I used to keep a journal about living in London. One day a girl emailed me about moving to the city and safe places to live. We emailed back and forth and when she came to London we decided to meet for tea. At the time, her emails were no different from the others who emailed about the journal but, now they are priceless. Why? Because that girl became my wife.

It’s fun to read through those early emails years later and see how we first interacted and came to know each other. At the time though, I could have just hit delete. After all, what immediate value did they have? None. If I had deleted them, I’d give almost anything to have them back.

Files also have valuable information that is not directly related to the contents of the document. Often, a file can tell you something that you didn’t intend it to. For example, email meta-data can tell you where you were on a given day, or the ‘created date’ field in a document can tell you when you started a project.

The Mechanics of Becoming a Digital pack rat

Now that you’re convinced of the benefits of digital pack-rattery, how to actually go about it?

The first rule of digital pack-rattery is don’t try to categorize things.

As much as possible, try not to play the meta-data game — it will suck your life away. When I need to find something, I rely on spotlight) to sort through the mess. (If you use windows, try google desktop) Currently, spotlight only finds text but I’m sure at some point it will be able to recognize people in photos, words in audio etc, so I keep everything, even the hopelessly unlabeled.

The second rule of digital pack-rattery is don’t delete; dump.

I keep a ‘most likely useless’ folder on my computer. This is where I dump everything that — were I a normal user — I would delete. It is my computer’s infinite attic. To make it simpler, I use an automator script to archive the files, then move them into ‘most likely useless’.

Eventually the ‘most likely useless’ folder grows too large for my tiny laptop hard drive. Then I take the contents and dump them onto an external hard drive with an even bigger ‘most likely useless’ folder.

The last rule of digital pack-rattery: backup, and backup your backup.

The last step is make sure that you have a good backup system. I can’t recommend the combination of Mozy and Time Machine enough.

Keep everything from now on. Future-you will be grateful.

--

Header photograph by asplosh