Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter, Research Suggests (bbc.com) 82
Emerging research on digital hoarding -- a reluctance to get rid of the digital clutter we accumulate through our work and personal lives -- suggests that it can make us feel just as stressed and overwhelmed as physical clutter. From a report: Not to mention the cybersecurity problems it can cause for individuals and businesses and the way it makes finding that one email you need sometimes seem impossible. The term digital hoarding was first used in 2015 in a paper about a man in the Netherlands who took several thousand digital photos each day and spent hours processing them. "He never used or looked at the pictures he had saved, but was convinced that they would be of use in the future," wrote the authors.
In a study published earlier this year Neave and his colleagues asked 45 people about how they deal with emails, photos, and other files. The reasons people gave for hanging on to their digital effects varied -- including pure laziness, thinking something might come in handy, anxiety over the idea of deleting anything and even wanting "ammunition" against someone. The team has used those responses to develop a questionnaire to assess digital hoarding behaviours in the workplace, and have tested it with 203 people who use computers as part of their job. Their findings show that email appears to be a particular problem: among participants, the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
In a study published earlier this year Neave and his colleagues asked 45 people about how they deal with emails, photos, and other files. The reasons people gave for hanging on to their digital effects varied -- including pure laziness, thinking something might come in handy, anxiety over the idea of deleting anything and even wanting "ammunition" against someone. The team has used those responses to develop a questionnaire to assess digital hoarding behaviours in the workplace, and have tested it with 203 people who use computers as part of their job. Their findings show that email appears to be a particular problem: among participants, the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
Desktop metaphor skewmorphism (Score:2)
I think the world lost something in moving away from skewmorphic icons for boring bauhaus styling.
as this shows there is a deep psychological mapping from real desktops to virtual ones.
This is not a surprise as many parts of the brain that do modern processing are just adaptation of things never intended for the purpose and as a result have advantages when new problems are cast in the old frameworks the neurons are actually organized for.
Apple's new UI feature "stacks" actually gathers all the shit in a fol
331 read emails? (Score:5, Funny)
Are they missing few decimal places with the emails? Those 92000 emails I have in just one of my inboxes are for just a couple of last few years. Do I have a problem? :)
Re:331 read emails? (Score:5, Insightful)
More important than the volume is the cost. The cost of storing it, the cost of finding the mail you want.
Storage is cheap. Finding stuff depends on the quality of your search system, or how much time you invest in organizing.
Unlike physical clutter, digital clutter doesn't necessarily mean you can't find what you want near the bottom of the pile.
Re:331 read emails? (Score:4, Insightful)
More important than the volume is the cost. The cost of storing it, the cost of finding the mail you want. Storage is cheap. Finding stuff depends on the quality of your search system, or how much time you invest in organizing.
I try to look at it from an efficiency standpoint, if I can spend one hour now organizing to save ten hours searching later then I organize. If it's ten hours to save one hour I don't. My conclusion is that as long as you don't have an obvious need for it in the future and you got a timeline it's best to just leave it be and see if you ever need to spend any time on it at all. If you do need to spend the time though, throw away everything you for sure don't need. If it's a couple years old that's probably a lot of it, sometimes I do this with a pile of old papers and in the end I might have two or three keepers. It's not really worth organizing as much as it's just taking out the trash. Other than that just put it in an "old" folder in the corner of your multi-TB drive. Unlike physical clutter it doesn't take up any living space, it doesn't collect dust, rot or grow mold, it's not a fire hazard... it's just a near invisible, near free, near infinite storage space.
I mean it's different if you're like trying to archive the internet and intentionally make huge libraries and stuff, like you want to be your own mini-Netflix or mini-Spotify. But for the average person I think those who don't keep such a pile of their documents are the strange ones, like they got some neat freak thing about having a big number somewhere like it somehow matters. I do care about the number of incoming mails, because I do have to spend time reading them or at the very least decide not to read them. But whether there's a hundred or a million mails in the archive doesn't bother me one bit. I think that's some strange hold-over from the physical world, like a whole diary is a lot of text but it's still extremely little data. The whole library of Congress is about ~15TB of data, I could mirror it. And there'd still be more clutter on my bookshelf.
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The only e-mails I delete are SPAM e-mails. Google Mail is very good at searching, and my work e-mail is well organized by yours truly. I never delete e-mails, and that helped me at work more than once, being able to dig up an e-mail from three years ago and prove I am not to blame for whatever fuck-up happened is worth it.
Re:331 read emails? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it's just the cost of storage or the cost of finding a particular thing, but also the psychology of seeing a bunch of junk, not knowing what it is, and not knowing if there's some problem lurking in that mess.
Like, ok, sure, it might not be too bad to find a particular email you're actively looking for. But how confident are you that you have a grasp of what information exists in your mailbox? How sure are you that you didn't miss an important email at some point, or forgot to respond to an email chain you were on?
Maybe you're extremely organized and you're fine. Or maybe you think you're fine, but the psychological stress is impacting you, but you're not consciously aware of it.
I'm pretty organized, but I've realized that it still stresses me out. I don't even remember all of the accounts I've signed up for over the past few decades. A while ago, I spent a few days trying to clear some of those out and shut them down. Still, there could be some old Dropbox account out there with a bunch of personal information that I signed up for with one of my old alternate addresses, and I might have just forgotten about it. Currently I have 4 different email accounts and 4 different online storage accounts, each for a different reason, but I think it adds to my stress level that I can't keep track of where all of my information is.
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I agree entirely. I've been doing the KonMari method and it's been great. I feel a lot better with less stuff around, and what I do have tidied away.
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Sounds Japanese. It must be good!
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Marie Kondo is an absolute genius. Her books are well worth a read.
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I'm pretty organized, but I've realized that it still stresses me out.
Then you have an anxiety disorder. Seek psychiatric help.
The only reason to get uptight about the amount of stuff on your drive is if you are
continually running out of space. Otherwise, who the hell cares?
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I think you're misreading the emphasis of what I'm saying. It doesn't stress me out in an obvious way like I'm walking around all day worrying about it. I talked about the possibility that people aren't consciously aware of the stress impacting them, and then said I "realized" that it's stressing me out.
The idea that I'm suggesting is, things like this might add to your stress level at a relatively low level, but it can accumulate without you knowing that's what's going on. It's likely happening to you,
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Organizing is a huge burden. I find it more useful to archive my storage every few years.
Like lets say you have a workbench so covered in clutter that you can't find anything. You could spend all weekend organizing it. Or you could just dump it all in a giant box, and put the box in the garage. The problem is, it doesn't scale well, and getting anything out of the archive is a huge hassle involving the "rummage sort" algorithm.
With computer storage, I can type a couple commands and move the whole thing into
400 Emails (Score:5, Insightful)
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
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Oh yes... This is just my work account and archive. I have no idea how much is in my personal accounts (including my very-similar spam account). The storage isn't full yet, so I don't care.
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Yep, and unless something drastic happens the storage will never be full. When I first opened my spam account in 2003(ish) I had 100MB of free space. Before I filled half of that, they upgraded it ton 500MB, and before I filled half of that it went to 1GB. Now its either 10 or 20GB and I'm using maybe 2 or 3GB, by the time my usage gets to 5GB they'll no doubt have upgraded my space to 50GB.
I know they are probably harvesting every morsel of data they can from all the emails, but the most they will get i
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email is easy to do... pics/vids are tougher (Score:2)
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
I only have 188 in my inbox now, all read. That is just Dec1 to date (Jan 8).
Everything else is saved off off by year/month (YYYY-MM for proper sorting), including my sent-mail in the same fashion.
Mine go back to 2002, I am not sure how many there are exactly. But I use fetchmail to pull in several accounts locally so it is fairly complete.
I use alpine for email, and can easily grep my archives to find something/someone if I need to, which does occur.
I don't consider it hoarding, it's saving. All of tho
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Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
My old yahoo e-mail has over 100k unread e-mail that I couldn't care less about. At work I simply read the five or so e-mails I get each day when they come in as it has minimal impact on my job. Any detailed discussions are usually via chat, phone or in person as real time conversations tend to work best.
As to read e-mail, work dictates that we archive all e-mail with our customers in case of contract disputes. With my personal e-mail, none of the providers are telling me I'm running out of space and searching for old e-mails takes far less time than sorting through all of the half legit/spam e-mails each day. Keeping everything is the most efficient use of my time.
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Keeping everything is the most efficient use of my time.
Exactly, storage is too cheap to worry about it.
dir foo.bar /a /s finds all the foo.bars I have on the drive.
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What the Jesus (Score:2)
Hard drive space is, basically, virtual space anyway (hard drives stay the same size but they can hold more data every year, actually hard drives are getting smaller), so why would anyone compare hoarding physical things to not purging files that aren't in the way anyway, and may very well be useful later.
The
Sample size: 45 (Score:2, Funny)
I have my emails dating back 25 years (Score:2, Insightful)
My email archive does come in handy from time to time, and most of the time it's just stowed away in a folder not taking up much space. How in the world is that supposed to stress me? Physical clutter gets in the way, I get that, but emails?
Nice try Windows 10 Disk Cleanup (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice try Windows 10 Disk Cleanup. I saw your other article about needing 7GB on my machines today.
For me the winning move is just to change jobs every few years. "All those emails I never answered? F' 'em. Clean inbox and a raise here I come!"
2015? (Score:3)
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Pokemon Go clutter (Score:3)
One major difference (Score:5, Insightful)
With physical hoarding, the burden is often eventually shifted onto family or friends. They are stuck with the expense and effort of a major clean-out if the hoarder ever dies or becomes incapacitated.
With digital hoarding, everything that was accumulated often fits into a shirt pocket. While it may stress out the actual hoarder, those who inherit it could easily dispose of it if they choose.
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Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
1.) Digital space is cheaper than physical space.
2.) The cost of digital space is decreasing with time because it's practically infinite.
3.) The cost of physical space is increasing with time because it's finite.
4.) Search functions are excellent, if you tag things correctly and/or use the right search terms, finding one email in millions takes seconds. Much easier than searching for things in physical space (which is why warehouses have digital records of where everything is).
Therefore no need to worry about digital hoarding. Everyone stop stressing. Problem solved, go home, get off my lawn.
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2-3. These statements make no sense. One, digital storage is not unlimited. It is limited by the amount of storage you have. The cloud companies have petabytes of that. If not exabytes. And unless there is a big storage device shortage going on, this will drive the prices down.
4. Depends on if you know what you are looking for.
It is not hoarding, it is cost management. (Score:3)
Say you get a bill in your email. That bill needs to be retained for a certain period of time in order to retain the latest contact/support information, balance the checkbook, and account for any errors with the billing agency or bank. Simply deleting that bill assumes perfection and/or inerrancy on the part of third parties.
Let those bills grow for some time, and suddenly you've got an entire folder of bills, intermingled with data breach notifications and administrative emails, etc. There may be an email or two which you need to "Pin" to the folder to prevent its deletion. And then do a "Sweep" or automated cleanup of other items to prevent clutter. Mail hasn't been that advanced until recently, and most mail services are still not that advanced. (Is GMail capable of all of those things?)
Later you buy one thing online, and suddenly you have inadvertently subscribed to 50 publications which email frequently. (Plus paper catalogs by snail mail apparently,...) Which you then have to manage which ones you have unsubscribed to while sorting and deleting them to prevent deletion of legitimate mail in your Inbox (like a first warranty renewal notification for a product, or an insurance bill from a new provider, or account theft alerts/purchase notifications you weren't expecting etc...).
Let that cycle repeat itself for all online activity, which is intertwined with a significant portion of our daily lives, and email becomes a task which requires a full time secretary position to maintain. Training email is now possible, but it is not a simple task. Then put all of that on the general populace who can't even change their Facebook diary postings from "Everyone/Public" to Friends or a private group, etc,...
It ain't hoarding, its giving up!
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Snowflakes (Score:2)
If a bit of uncataloguged cruft on your storage is going to destroy your brain then you must be a bit of a snowflake. Smart human beings can cope with web sites like this https://viralzone.expasy.org/ [expasy.org] and remember vast swathes of it. Check in your nerd card right now if your personal data has beaten you.
I do hoarding to some degree, as stress relief (Score:2)
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I do something fairly similar. I think it's some scientist gene that makes you want to store and categorize things so knowledge isn't lost. At least that is what I tell myself. And when it's too tedious to sort well, I at least just save it somewhere.
lazy (Score:2)
Wait... (Score:2)
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Err. (Score:2)
"Digital Hoarding Can Make Us Feel Just as Stressed and Overwhelmed as Physical Clutter,"
(Closes the tab to https://www.techradar.com/news... [techradar.com])
(Quietly sets down the 4TB external drive he was considering to add to the other three...)
Oh?...I....um, ok, nevermind.
Hoarders hoard (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what it is, they always think it will be of use in the future.
One-line solution for halting hoarder stress (Score:2)
$ mv ~/* ~/.unseen
More justifications? (Score:2)
From the article:
Some think that because they’ve enabled it, tech companies should help fix our digital hoarding tendencies. Sedera believes there will soon be platform-agnostic ways of indexing and curating all our data across devices, similar to how the contacts on your phone sync across apps.
Nope. I don't need yet more people telling me to get rid of stuff because they feel it's not important to me. I'm fed up with minimal UIs taking control and options away from me to improve my experience.
My data doesn't hurt or clutter anyone else's life, so give me decent searching tools and GTFO.