Over the last few months I have been trying to declutter my house. I have plenty of space, but the boxes of computer equipment (some from the 80s!), video games, DVDs, and documents are taking up far too much room, and much of it will never be looked at again. However, some of it might contain valuable information, or be otherwise worth preserving for sentimental value (I’m aware this is a slippery slope to a true hoarding addiction, but most family heirlooms on one side of my family are being held captive by a single psycho relative). Therefore, I am on a campaign to compress as much as I can. I have been shucking the keep-cases for all of my DVDs and software and scanning the label, and in some cases recording the activation keys that come with them. I also scan all documents pertaining to my car and health insurance such as bills, service summaries, or cards. These will be useful one day when I finally sell my car or go toe-to-toe (legally) withe health insurance ghouls.
My secondary goal is to reduce the amount of information I receive. One way I’m doing that is by striving for “inbox zero”. Inbox zero is a fairly simple concept that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the goal should be having as close to 0 messages in your inbox as possible because you have rules and filters in place to get messages to their proper folders or sent straight to trash here’s an article with more information (It’s published by BYU, which lends it extra credibility IMHO). Reaching inbox zero has been quite a feat if you’re a packrat like me, but I’ve kept it up for a few months now. The real sticky part for me is emails from friends & loved ones. However, those can be pretty easily downloaded as PDF and archived offline. Marketing emails are a pretty constant battle, but can be pretty easily found by searching all your messages for the word, “unsubscribe”.
The data hoarder mindset will also hopefully prepare me for a much more challenging goal I have for 2026, which is to remove advertisements from my field of view.