Packrat photo how to#

If you’re a digital packrat like I am, and want to be cured, there is a simple cure that I’ve gone through and recommend to everyone:

Packrat photo how to#

How to Cure Digital Packrattery, With Practical Tips But if you’d like to declutter your digital life and learn the simpler ways of a Zen Habits digital existence, see the next section for a cure and some practical tips based on my experience. Now, if being a digital packrat is OK with you, I am not disparaging you. If you answered “yes” to more than one of these questions, more than likely, you’re a digital packrat. Do you have folders of stuff to read that would take a year to actually read?.Do you have project files from 2 years ago?.Are any of your digital file systems overwhelming?.Do you have multiple accounts for similar things, making it hard to find stuff?.Do you have multiple duplicates of photos, and is it hard to find a photo you need?.Is your email program nearly full, or do you use more than one email account because of all the storage you need?.Is your list of Internet bookmarks long and overwhelming?.Do you have 20 or more folders and sub-folders in your documents folder on your hard drive?.The main way to know: 1) you feel that you should keep a lot of files “just in case” 2) it takes you too long to find stuff 3) your digital life is becoming complicated, with multiple email accounts, drives, storage mediums and either a mess of files or a mess of folders. How do I know? Because I recently decluttered my digital life to a great extreme, and the relief and speed increases I’ve found since then have been enormous. It can slow down your computer, it can complicate your life, it can cost you time in terms of productivity, and it can stress you out more than you know. Trouble is, there are costs to such packrattery.

Photos, mp3s, video files, pdfs, word processing documents, spreadsheets, you name it, and I had a bunch of them somewhere. I had all kinds of files in my email, because Gmail storage is so cheap (free) that I felt I didn’t need to delete anything. I had all kinds of files on my hard drive, just because I thought I might need them. While my outer life has become fairly simple, as I declutter my home and workspace, and my paper files have also become pretty simple, my digital life was a mess. I have a confession to make: until recently, I was a digital packrat.