Digital Clutter and What to Do About It
I spent a few days recently going through old hard drives. Not the kind of task anyone puts on a to-do list with any enthusiasm, but I'd been putting it off for long enough that the drives themselves were becoming a concern. Some of them are old enough that I wasn't sure they'd spin up at all.
The experience was roughly what you'd expect. Thousands of files organized according to systems I no longer remember devising. Folders nested four or five levels deep with names like "misc_backup_final_v2" and "old_stuff_DO_NOT_DELETE." Screenshots of things I can't identify. PDFs I apparently thought were important enough to save but not important enough to name properly.
Digital clutter accumulates differently than physical clutter. Physical clutter announces itself. You see the stack of papers on your desk, the boxes in the closet, the drawer that won't close. Digital clutter is invisible until you go looking for it, which means it can grow unchecked for years. I've been using computers long enough that the accumulated mass of files across various drives, cloud accounts, and backup disks is genuinely difficult to comprehend as a single collection.
The usual advice is to organize everything. Set up a system, stick to it, be disciplined. I've tried this many times. I've read books about personal knowledge management. I've experimented with tagging systems, hierarchical folder structures, flat structures with search, databases with custom schemas. The pattern is always the same: I set up something elaborate, maintain it religiously for a few weeks, and then gradually stop as real work takes priority over meta-work.
What I've come to accept is that a certain amount of digital clutter is inevitable and perhaps even healthy. The alternative — a perfectly organized filesystem with nothing out of place — would require me to spend more time organizing than actually working. At some point the overhead of the system exceeds the value it provides.
That said, there are levels. Some clutter is benign — a downloads folder full of PDFs you might reference someday. Some clutter is actively harmful — duplicate files eating disk space, old credentials sitting in plaintext, project folders with so many versions that you can't tell which is current. The goal shouldn't be zero clutter but rather the reduction of harmful clutter to manageable levels.
My current approach, such as it is, involves a few simple rules. First: name files well at the moment of creation. A good filename is worth more than any organizational system. If a file is called "regional-survey-notes-draft.txt" I can find it years later without remembering where I put it. If it's called "notes.txt" it might as well not exist.
Second: don't create folders preemptively. I used to set up elaborate directory structures for projects before I'd done any work. Inevitably, the structure didn't match the reality of the project as it unfolded. Now I start with a flat folder and only create subdirectories when the number of files makes it genuinely hard to find things.
Third: accept that some things will be lost. Not everything needs to be preserved. If I haven't looked at a file in several years and can't remember what it contains from the filename alone, the odds that I'll ever need it are low. I've gotten more comfortable with deleting things, or at least moving them to a "cold storage" drive that I don't pretend I'll ever actively use.
Fourth, and maybe most importantly: don't let the backlog prevent you from maintaining the present. It's easy to look at a decade of accumulated mess and feel paralyzed. The old drives can wait. What matters is that the files I'm creating today are named sensibly and stored in a place I can find them tomorrow. The backlog is a project for a rainy weekend, not a prerequisite for being organized going forward.
I'm still working through those old drives, a little at a time. It's oddly meditative. Every so often I find something genuinely worth keeping — a draft of something I'd forgotten I wrote, a photograph I didn't remember taking. Those small discoveries make the whole exercise worthwhile, even if ninety percent of what I find goes straight to the recycle bin.
— Kevin Vadala