Are You a Digital Hoarder?

Clearly hoarding is something looked at as an anomaly since there are entire shows about it. But what about being a digital hoarder?  This week I’ve spent a large number of hours taming one client’s email.  It went back as far as 2004.  His Inbox alone was 28,322 emails.  That didn’t include subfolders, sent items, deleted items (that was 3,270 alone!) and drafts.  His feeling was if he kept it, he would always have it if he needed it. I beg to differ.

Outlook as a piece of software was never designed to handle that kind of volume. In fact, it was really only made to handle about 2GB worth of email.  And for the average person, that’s all they can handle as well. We all get email every day that we will never need again – and probably didn’t need today.  So rather than just bury your head and say you need it, set yourself up to succeed.

If you get an email that you never wanted and won’t need – you know the ones. “KAYAK alert!” or “Land’s End Deals” or whatever. 99% of those you never need to see again and if you did, you can find the deal on their website.  To remove those, hold your shift key down when you hit delete.  This will prompt you to permanently remove the email from your system. GONE.

Next, it is fine to use your Deleted Items as a holding place. Just give yourself a time limit.  One of the best organization tips I ever got was to take items you didn’t think you would need in your house or office and put them in a box.  Label the box “trash if not opened before” and put a date on it.  Then if you need something, you change the label. Otherwise, on that date the box just goes to Goodwill.  This is the same concept you can use with Outlook.  Put items in Deleted Items knowing they will be there for a certain period of time.  I personally never keep more than 2 weeks of email in my Deleted Items. It is simple to go in and delete everything older than 2 weeks and honestly, I don’t remember what I had for dinner. Let alone what I sent in an email three weeks ago!

Set up Rules. Rules can route your email automatically into folders so you can keep your Inbox clean.  In my Outlook, anything that comes from LinkedIn goes into a LinkedIn folder. Newsletters have their own folder, my personal email account goes into a folder, etc. You can also use this to clean up email you currently have in the Inbox.  If you create a rule, before you click Finish, check the box to run the rule first.  This will move any emails into their new folders automatically. I often use this as a way to find email I can delete from people’s systems.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t help you or your computer to hold onto email in an unorganized fashion.  Personally, I create folders for each of my clients and the organizations I belong to and file email both sent and received in those files.  Then when I won’t be dealing with them for awhile, I archive that file with a name indicating who they are. I can easily open the archive file and check it out without any concerns that I will lose information but it is also out of the way and organized.

Okay – end of discussion. Back to archiving his email!