[spookthesunset]

> I was wondering about translating it into organising my digital life.

Yeah, I've gone down this path too. The thing about digital is storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. There is very little cost to having a lot of "clutter" in your digital world. It doesn't take up physical space and it doesn't really occupy mental space either. Arguably the cost of trying to de-clutter it is higher than the cost of accidentally deleting something you might want in the future, which is why I'm pretty sure I have never bothered. Put another way, decluttering your digital space is a potentially NPV negative affair--the costs of accidental deletion and time spent decluttering outweigh the gains made by having a "decluttered" digital space.

The only thing in the digital world I think I could justify de-cluttering is my photos. I take a lot of duplicate pictures with slightly different variations in lighting and focus. Having 10 slightly different versions of the same scene is clutter -- especially when 8 of them feature people with their eyes closed, not smiling, not looking at the camera, not in focus, etc.

The rest of my digital stuff isn't like that--there is no 10 slightly different copies of the same paper I wrote in college 10 years ago. Just one. Why bother deleting it? An e-book I read once three years ago and will probably never read again only takes up 30 megs of space when pulled down from the cloud. It doesn't occupy physical space in my life. Why delete it? It costs more of my time & energy to nuke it than just let it be.

[glhaynes]

Well said. One important part of that for me is to resist any attempt to impose a structure on those "piles" of digital docs. For the things you mention, I'm exclusively going to access them in the future — if I ever do — via search (or perhaps in some late-night nostalgic browsing) so I don't need to organize the paper I wrote in college into a complicated folder hierarchy of College > Biology > 2nd semester. Just throw it on the pile. Embrace its pileness. If archiving a doc in this way takes any thought whatsoever, I'm going to be much less likely to do the archiving in the first place and it's going to end up causing clutter in some place where it does negatively affect me.

[bowlich]

I've found a lot of improvement in my digital productivity by following plaintext productivity's [1] for organizing my files. But, I also pretty much put everything older than a year that I'm not working on into a giant archive bin that I attempt to organize in no shape or fashion. There's twenty odd years of files going all the way back to middle school in there and trying to make any sense of it would be a waste.

1: http://plaintext-productivity.net/3-00-files-introduction.ht...