The Deletist

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.

 

I hear this phrase a lot in both my personal and professional life. I’m continually amazed at the reticence people have to delete anything digital, especially email.  It’s not uncommon for me to see email accounts with thousands of read/unread messages. Whenever I suggest that a large amount of the emails could, in fact, be deleted, the users often resist.  Here are some common justifications:

• I need those.  One time x years ago I needed something and luckily it was still in my email.
• I never know what I’m going to need so I like to save everything, just in case.

Whenever I hear this I always like to ask “just in case of what?” My mind immediately thinks about just-in-case scenarios where hoarding and mismanaging emails is detrimental.

Just in case my email account gets hacked I want to know exactly what was compromised.  Often when people save everything they don’t know, or remember, exactly what’s stored in their email account.  

Just in case I want Google to learn even more about my habits by analyzing the content of my emails. The more information I keep, the more data companies have to analyze. For the moment the intention is to create targeted advertising, but who knows what else can be done with the data in the future.

Just in case I need something later that I didn’t realize I would need. This reason probably has the most weight with users because it illustrates the unknown. Deleting emails scares people because they don’t want to get in trouble later for not having something or they need a CYA paper trail.  However, understanding how to recognize (and create) emails of value and practicing strategic saving can help to combat this mentality.

A few months ago I had a conversation with an IT guy who saves all his email.  He felt justified because storage is cheap and he never knew when he would need something.  I pressed for an example and he told me about a time when he had to reinstall MS Office on his computer and the information was in a 2-year-old email.  He spent ~10-15 minutes searching for the right email.  I pointed out that this scenario is a perfect example of strategic saving.  I would have saved that email someplace obvious because that’s valuable information and not wasted time searching.

In my opinion, people tend to fixate on the few times when saving something for an excessive period of time ended up being beneficial as a justification to save everything all the time. However, to only focus on these exceptions negates all the other times when something was purged and never needed again.