![\"Digital](\"https:\/\/images.coachingforleaders.com\/cb:ztCJ~31fd5\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/f:best\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/teachinginhighered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/STOP.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis first happened about four years ago. My friend admitted that she had been letting people down and not following through with her commitments. Let's call her Laura. I'll admit to having been sometimes frustrated that she\u00a0didn't get back to me on stuff, since we were on committees together and our paths crossed regularly in our work. It was easy to forgive her, though, because I know Laura\u00a0cared so much and had so much on her plate. What I didn't realize at the time was her big secret as to why she was getting increasingly worse at managing her life as a professor.<\/p>\n
We were in my office and she finally broke down and cried one day.\u00a0Laura\u00a0had forgotten about a meeting she was supposed to attend and had no idea how on earth she was going to get things together for an end-of-the-year event. She said she just couldn't keep up with it all, particularly the email. We talked around the issue for a few minutes, but then got to the heart of the matter. She had more than 7,000 emails in her inbox, much of which she associated with unfinished business.<\/p>\n
The costs of having a lot of digital clutter aren't immediately evident. Storage costs for data have come down so much that IT departments keep raising the storage they make available to us and it is easy for us to buy another hard drive or sign up for another cloud service. The costs come when we think about how much time we spend trying to find what we need, or having to start over again with something. There's also the stress of having a system we don't trust.<\/p>\n
Here are four\u00a0steps to stop yourself from becoming a digital hoarder:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Press the reset button<\/h2>\n
This step looks different, depending on where the biggest challenge is in how you manage data. If it is email, create a folder called something like z-old (the “z” is so that it will show up last in the list of folders) and move every email from your inbox in to it. You now have an empty inbox and a blank slate.<\/p>\n
If you've got binders full of (will I ever be able to start typing “binders full of…” and not want to finish it with the word “women?”<\/a>) old publications that you now know exist online, dump those reams of paper in the recycle bin and commit to going electronic in the future.<\/p>\n Now it is time to set up a system that is going to work for you and be sustainable. We talk about how we have set up our personal knowledge management (PKM) structures both in the podcast episodes #008<\/a>, #009<\/a>, and #010<\/a>, as well as in my PKM online modules<\/a>. I think most of us make our categorizing systems more complicated than they need to be.<\/p>\nSet up your foundation<\/h2>\n