Moving and Decluttering

Moving to a new home often inspires people to declutter. Similarly, moving to a new computer often inspires people to do some digital decluttering.

Two women whose writings I follow have touched on this just recently. I'm just including a short snippet of each article here; the full articles are well worth a read.

First, here's Nancy Nall:

I’m starting to think having my hard drive melt down — which it didn’t, but it’s more easily understandable than “corrupted firmware update that cannot be repaired with out a wipe and reformat” — is the best thing that’s happened to me this year, and it’s not because I have a lightning-fast new machine to play with. I’m reintroducing my backed-up data to the new machine slowly, and with careful consideration of each byte.

And here's organizer Monica Ricci:

In the process of migrating my data, I discovered that I had a fair amount of “document detritus” on my hard drive. ...

Faced with the proposition of copying a bunch of well... frankly, CRAP onto my brand new, pristine (not to mention GINORMOUS) shiny new hard drive, I bristled. And then I left 80% of my documents behind! ...

I’m here to tell you that leaving all those documents behind was cleansing! Freeing! Downright cathartic!

[photo by vkotis / vincent kondas, licensed under Creative Commons]