Uncategorized »

We live in a world where less is more.  Cell phones have gotten smaller, tvs have gotten thinner and your entire music collection has been reduced to an mp3 player.  So that means we have less junk, right?  Wrong.

My times have changed.  All the gadgets that used to clutter up our shelves – the camcorders, alarm clocks, cameras… all of those things have now converged into one convenient device known as the smart phone.  We seem to have less a need for STUFF.

When I look to generations before mine (my parents, my grandparents…) they would essentially hoard things.  They keep boxes of pictures and cassette tapes, just to reminisce about days gone by.  But you know what?  Our generation does that too.  Only, you can’t see it.  It’s digital hoarding.

Think you might suffer from digital hoarding?  Well, here are some symptoms.

1)  You keep every email, “just in case”
I’m definitely guilty of this one.  These days, especially with web-based email, there doesn’t seem to be much of a necessity to get rid of any emails.  My account has every single legitimate email I’ve ever received since I opened the account when I was a teenager.

2)  You’ve never deleted a single digital photo you’ve downloaded from your camera.
Again, I’ll refer to my personal hoarding to show you how far digital picture hoarding can go. I have over 6,000 photos saved on my laptop.  No word of a lie

3)  You installed a game five years ago and haven’t played it since 2007.
Just the other day, I finally deleted the Sims 2 from my computer.

I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with digital hoarding.  I mean, we’re human.  We like to keep our treasured things nearby and accessible should the need ever arise.  Like real hoarding, it becomes a problem when it has a negative effect on you.

Keeping all this junk on your computer will slow it down.  And as you near your storage limit, your computer will grind to a near standstill.  You could get an external hard drive and move all those un-needed files there… or, you could put it ‘in the cloud’.  ‘In the cloud’ is a term that essentially means uploading all those files to a secure website.  For example, a site called Mozy lets you upload ALL of those files you don’t need, but can’t bring yourself to delete.  And it’ll cost you just $5/month.

The best part is it’s online.  So, all those documents, songs, pictures, videos will be accessible to you whenever and wherever you need them… as long as you have an internet connection.

Something to think about.