Are you a digital hoarder?

On evaluating my online home

Hi friends,

I, too, have been playing around with all of the recent features Substack has given its writers.

I’m now publishing on two tracks, The Vital Neighborhood and Postcards. The Postcards track serves two purposes:

• It makes me feel like I’m getting my digital house in order. Which is topical, because today I want to talk about digital hoarding.

• It makes it easier for me to send out fast thinking on ideas like digital hoarding that I am not going to relate to vital neighborhoods (yet).

Now, on to a new phenomenon I learned about last week.

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What is in Your Digital Closet?

This past week I attended a salon hosted by Annie Pfeifer on Hoarding in the Digital Age.

A title that made me simultaneously think “What’s that?” and “I think I might do that.”

I have three bad online habits that I worry border on digital hoarding:

• I set up digital systems or workflows that don’t really serve me. I learned about the idea of a “Read Later” folder, for example. The goal is actually to DECLUTTER with this handy tool, dumping reports people send you or pdfs you discover during research all in one place, allowing you to archive emails and close tabs. The problem is I only look at this folder when adding to it. I think if someone snuck into my house and deleted the whole thing while I was sleeping I’d be grateful.

• I hate cleaning up my digital clutter. I’ll listen to podcasts while doing laundry and enjoy the virtuous feeling of a clean apartment after dropping bags of old clothes and kitchen utensils off at the charity shops. But digital decluttering exhausts me. Every download or screenshot represents a micro-decision – a thing I meant to do (and maybe still should).

• I became obsessed with building my second brain (which is a system for note-taking and sense-making) a few years back, which I now worry is an excuse to hoard old ideas, journals, and highlights from everything I’ve read…

Annie kicked off the discussion by breaking down the difference between hoarding and collecting.

A collector is proud of their items. A hoarder feels shame. A collection is often valuable. We hoard useless things, even though we tell ourselves we’ll need it all one day. In the physical world, hoarding also causes dysfunction. It makes spaces hard to use, and “life” harder to do. But how does that play out when I can create infinite online folders?

It’s easy for me to declare commonly hoarded physical items as useless. Stacks of restaurant menus that take up the entire food prep area of a kitchen. Multiple drawers of free sugar packets.

I have 14,636 emails from my decade at Access Afya, filed away in a google workspace in case I need to rekindle an old contact or prove we submitted that final project report. Easy to disguise these as useful. But am I really that different?

My favorite point raised was by fellow Substacker

Ethan Heppner

, who talked about hoarding as a response to uncertainty. Early cases followed the Great Depression, and more recently, we saw Americans and toilet paper in the early days of a pandemic.

Maybe I keep all these reports because I know knowledge work is crucial to the future of work, and there are sentences and charts in there that might spark my next big idea. Maybe I keep all my old journals (and essays… and twitter threads…) because I wish I had more stories from my grandfathers and I don’t know who will want to read mine one day. Maybe it’s uncertainty that causes me to hold on.

Cleaning Out My Closet 

I felt better about my digital habits after the discussion. One person who responded to Annie Pfeifer’s call for digital hoarding examples had over a thousand tabs open! I’ve also experienced none of the challenges to daily functioning described in the first clinical case of digital hoarding.

I also came out with empathy. It is hard to understand what is truly useful in a world where we have near infinite information and storage. But I did reflect on two things I can pay closer attention to.

#1 Letting go of information is an important part of information management. 

Fei-Ling Tseng

writes about this in her Minimum Viable Zettelkasten book. Fleeting notes are great for capturing everything, but eventually you save, sort or delete them. I’m slowly starting to enjoy deleting fleeting notes from my second brain that don’t help shape my worldview. A note on biomimicry and cities that I hadn’t related to a conviction or essay after over a year. A highlight from an article that was really just a statistic I can google later if I need it.

I’m still feeling this one out, but it’s liberating to prune the digital garden as it grows.

A snapshot of how I keep notes in a holding zone. I eventually summarize and assign these to projects, convictions, questions or essays I’m writing.

#2 Life is too short to read stuff that doesn’t make you feel something.

I went ahead and deleted my Read Later folder after the event. Some of the files live on in more functional folders like “Impact Investing” next to writing and meeting notes, but I realized there was probably a reason I wasn’t opening most of those PDFs.

In his much-loved visualizations on how much time we have left (The Tail End), Tim Urban writes:

Not counting Wait But Why research, I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I’ll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I’ll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest.

Approximately how many books I have left to read

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Our stuff takes up a tiny bit of headspace to keep track of. And digital stuff, even if it is cheaper to store and easy to file into a seemingly neat system, is no different.

While writing this, I immediately thought of this leopard. It was only the second time I saw one, and I got eight pictures of him yawning, and a dozen more of him walking around. I know I should edit down my safari photos so I can make an album that captures magical moments, not every second.

The point is, I knew exactly where these pictures were, and could visualize the two rows of images that would come up in my Photos app. The things I index digitally take up some of my real brain space.

True to classic hoarding anxiety re: letting go, I could not choose just one of these pictures to keep.

Definitions aside, I think it comes down to stress. Bookmarked tabs and saved files to read later create a nagging sense of obligation. My old journals on the other hand bring me joy even if rarely revisited. I want my digital home, like my London one, to feel like ME, not like a to-do list. If you don’t feel the nagging need to organize your photos, you probably have the right amount. If you feel dread when clicking on your downloads folder, it’s probably worth reevaluating why so many things end up there, undone.

What do you all think? Does digital hoarding matter if you organize it in infinitely “neat” folders? How many tabs do you have open?

Until next time,

Melissa