The Deletist

A couple months ago I did a massive purge in my apartment. It was interesting for me to see what types of clutter I was accumulating and where it ended up in my place.  I have to confess that I was surprised at my collection of pillowcases carefully tucked away in the linen closet. Although I do get rid of things regularly as part of my never-ending quest to be a minimalist, somehow the pillowcases had been ignored for a long time.  This is how I ended up with 19 of them.

Here are some quick facts about the situation. I own 3 pillows. Two of the pillows are tempurpedic and will only fit in one pair of pillowcases. This means that I have 17 pillowcases for my one remaining normal pillow.  I do realize that this is a distinctly  first-world problem, but it made me think of the bigger implications of what was going on.

1. I have random, and somewhat useless, accumulations of things that are not benefitting me.
2. These random and somewhat useless things were escaping detection and therefore not being purged.
3. I couldn’t adequately explain where it all came from.

Doing a massive purge of the things in my apartment was cathartic, but I quickly realized how difficult this task would be to replicate with my digital items.  Once stuff is digital it’s a lot easier to accumulate and it often escapes detection a lot longer. And then I just don’t care as much because the end result is not always that obvious or gratifying.

When I cleaned out my apartment I could visibly see more space and less piles of clutter in the corners.  This made me feel positive and productive.  But to spend time performing the same type of cleanup with my digital items just doesn’t feel the same. Sure it’s nice to have everything look neat on my desktop and be easily retrievable, but that’s how most of my stuff is anyway.  I guess it doesn’t feel the same because the space created isn’t visible and doesn’t matter since storage is so cheap.

As for the pillowcases, I kept 6 pairs, 4 of which belonged with sheet sets, 1 special pair for the tempurpedic pillows, and 1 extra set because I liked it. The remaining 7 were all donated.

For the last three months I’ve been closing down one email account and transferring everything over to another account.  I haven’t changed my email address in over 10 years and I’m quite surprised at how complex and daunting this task seems.  In some ways it feels even more onerous than updating phone numbers and addresses during a move since email is connected in more ways.  It’s used for multiple purposes such as:

 

Changing my email address requires me to:

• Notify all my contacts, sometimes multiple times. 
• Determine which accounts use the old email address for subscriptions/newsletters, logins, contact information, and password recovery.
  • Access each account to update the necessary information.
• Save important emails from old account by forwarding or downloading them.
• Maintain old account for undefined period of time.  Inevitably I will forget to update one account or contact.  
• Forward email from old account to new account for any new arrivals.

Email usage feels so casual most of the time, that I sometimes forget how much work is involved to maintain it.  Or how easy it is to connect it to so many different aspects of my life.  Or how easy it is to have so many different email accounts.  Including personal and professional email addresses, I have about seven separate ones, though I’m in the process of closing down two of them.

I don’t mind having separate email accounts because each one serves a different purpose.  I do mind not being able to check them all in one centralized location.  The next phase of my email account cleanup will be researching options to have them all in one place so I can check everything at the same time.

Many people view destruction as something negative and this viewpoint is not entirely unfounded.  After all when we hear about destruction it’s usually accompanied by violence, a natural disaster, or something with a negative connotation.  It’s the kind of action that makes people squirm and get uncomfortable.  “What if we need it?” they ask as my fingers hover over the red DESTROY button.

At times like these I am reminded of something my aunt told me when she worked as a librarian.  Any decent library regularly weeds their collection of items (books, CDs, DVDs, etc.) to ensure that they are circulated and current.  Check out this website, Awful Library Books, if you want to see what happens when libraries don’t regularly weed the collection.

My aunt told me that sometimes her staff felt squeamish about removing books from the collection.  She used to have conversations with them about the importance of weeding that went something like this:

Staff: What if somebody comes in and asks for the book I removed?

My aunt: Tell them that you’re sorry but they’re a day too late.  It’s been removed from the collection.

Sometimes I feel like we should adopt the same habit to regularly weed our own collections of stored information.  When we can’t find something we can tell ourselves, “Sorry, but we’re too late” and move on with our lives.  I do realize there’s a big difference between a library book and a document, but the basic idea is still there behind the action of purging regularly.

Routinely weeding, or purging, allows us to observe another side of destruction that is often overlooked. When I destroy, or get rid of, stuff I only think about all the space I’m making for new things. In fact my approach, as The Deletist, is to focus on what I need to save so that I feel confident about destroying (or getting rid of) everything else.

To destroy things artfully it’s important to learn a few tricks.

1. Ask yourself if anybody is going to die if you get rid of something and you don’t have it later on the small chance you might need it.
2. Save strategically.  Pay attention to what you need in your professional and personal lives.  Focus your energy and resources on saving and managing these things. Get rid of the rest.
3. Establish criteria based on observations of your usage and needs. Don’t waffle on it.  For example libraries weed books based on how often they get checked out.  A book with poor circulation will be removed to make space for something more popular.
4. Set aside time to go through your things (clothes, email, documents, etc.) and try out your criteria.
5. Start with something easy.

Happy purging.