Your Digital Clutter is a Problem -- Here's Why
Storing data is important for everyone. But do you have a system in place to help you manage all of your things?
Have you taken a tally of all of your digital files?
You know all the documents, pictures, videos, and emails you’ve safely stored away in the cloud?
According to one estimate, the average person has 500 GB of data stored in the cloud.
The problem isn’t so much the volume of data you have but how you keep it all organized. Approximately 30% of working professionals have 100+ files on their desktop alone. I, for one, am guilty as charged of that.
Most of us rely on companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to store our data for us. The thing is they’re doing so without you and I — the end-user — in mind.
What happens to all of your digital files when you lose access to the cloud? What happens when a company like Google decides to pull the plug on a tool you use? And what happens to your data when a tech company folds altogether?
As we move into a new era of AI-powered computing many existing companies are going to transform or even disappear altogether. The desire for AI to create more efficiencies in the economy could prompt many tech companies to reduce the amount of digital clutter clogging their servers.
That means we’re going to need to start thinking of how we organize and store our digital data. That’s not something you probably want to do and it could become problematic if you’re not prepared. Without a data management process, important artifacts like your work portfolio, financial history, and personal memories could disappear into the ether.
This essay is going to talk about a side of tech that rarely gets talked about. Some platforms are so integrated into our lives that it’s difficult to imagine a world without them. As a result, many of us have turned these platforms into our personal data archives. But what happens to all the stuff that we’re keeping on these platforms? How do we keep track of our data in a rapidly changing world?
We have way too much digital clutter and not enough systems to manage all of it.
Your digital life probably looks like a room straight out of Hoarders. I know mine sure does. But instead of your house being filled with junk, it’s your inbox and hard drive.
Thanks to cloud computing and cheap data storage, there’s been little incentive for any of us to implement systems to manage our data. Our inboxes are filled with unread emails and screenshots collect metaphorical dust. Before you know it, Apple is pinging you to tell you to upgrade your cloud storage plan.
We all have a ton of digital clutter and few of us have a system to organize it. This impacts your life and it’s becoming quite a problem.
According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, digital clutter creates “digital debt” that makes it hard for us to work. It creates unnecessary stress and anxiety every time you boot up your computer.
Instead of having the bandwidth to think strategically, many workers are stuck in low-value coordination tasks like retrieving documents or responding to emails.
Meetings are a byproduct of this. Many meeting agendas could be addressed via email. But without an adequate system of reading, filing, and deleting items in your inbox, you might miss important information. Love them or hate them, having meetings ensures the information that needs to get across actually does.
Without proper systems in place data simply piles up. AI won’t solve this. In fact, it could make an AI’s job much harder. The more data that you accrue the more time you — or an AI assistant — will need to be spent sifting through all of it to find what you need.
When you don’t know the data you have, you risk losing it forever.
My parents have cardboard boxes in their basement filled with important pictures and mementos from my childhood. No, I don’t regularly review those documents, but I know they’re there. If I want to retrieve an image of me from my childhood, I can.
In theory, the same should be true for digital artifacts. In practice that’s not always the case. If you change your file structures or switch to a new document format it can make it difficult to retrieve older information.
This creates friction in how you use different products and what kind of data you store on them. For a while I used Evernote. I loved how I could use an extension to add screenshots to my notes. But after a while, it stopped being useful. Evernote files are in a separate format and aren’t compatible with PDFs or Word documents. On a couple of occasions, Evernote didn’t update my files. Blocks of text I had spent hours writing simply disappeared.
More and more new products are coming online, especially AI-enabled products. Before you know it, your digital history is spread across multiple products and platforms: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Evernote, Notion…
Some files are stored locally on your hard drive while others live in the cloud. It’s impossible to search through all of your artifacts and trying to take an inventory of everything could feel like more work than it’s worth.
We’ve spent so much time building lives online that we haven’t paused to think about what this means for all of the data we’ve generated. While losing a Word Document could be unpleasant, losing other types of files could be irrecoverable.
I first logged onto Facebook in 2008. Throughout my late teens and early 20s, Facebook and Instagram became the repository for my memories. More than a decade’s worth of pictures are stored on Facebook’s servers. If Facebook folded tomorrow or Instagram decided to purge inactive accounts, I would lose all of that data.
Part of that is a function of my own neglect. I can and should download my pictures. But part of it is how we interact with these platforms. Instagram is a mobile-first platform after all. Many users snap and shoot images right from within the app. Even if you wanted to save your images locally to a computer hard drive, the process for doing so isn’t exactly user-friendly.
Memories no longer live in cardboard boxes in our parents’ basements. They live online. Social media platforms and cloud storage servers have become de facto archives. The more digital artifacts we create, the more cluttered our digital lives become. It makes it harder to not just retrieve important files, but to make sure they’re saved too.
Final takeaway.
Advances in technology have made it easier to generate data. The problem is that we haven’t built the right systems to manage that data. It piles up and few people know what to do with all of it.
This creates inefficiencies in how we work. We spend too much time doing low-value tasks that don’t really move the needle forward.
Meanwhile, a lack of digital management systems makes it difficult to protect the important information we do have.
We’ve turned platforms like Google and Facebook into our personal archives. Except those companies aren’t in the business to store our digital clutter. If and when they decide a product is no longer valuable they can and will pull the plug.
What happens to all of your data? Do you have a process in place to retrieve it?
AI is here and it’s going to just change the way we work. Many people will be tempted to layer AI solutions into their existing workflows. Before you do that, take stock of what you have.
Create systems to manage your data. Store important documents locally. Eliminate and automate redundant tasks before soliciting AI to do your work for you.
Data is the new oil after all. It’s not just large tech companies that can benefit from your data. Your ability to manage it could be an important skill to develop in the near future too.