I know a lot of people who are file collectors, ranging from keeping every possible bit of information which has a memory attached to it, to keeping all their emails even though they’ve dealt with them.
I personally feel that a lot of this stuff can weigh us down, so I try to keep it all to a minimum. But there is always going to be a lot of ‘digital junk’ that has to be dealt with – even if you are careful about what you keep.
The ‘Spam’ folder
One of the biggest sources for digital junk is obviously spam, by letting email into your life you’re opening yourself up to all kinds of rubbish. Because email was essentially invented by hippies, there’s no system in place to force users to prove who they are – this means you can send an email from Bill Gates without any email servers batting an eyelid.
Yea sure things are better these days, but I still tend to get quite a lot of spam. I also have a policy where any email address that isn’t trusted is automatically put into my spam folder. Because of this I tend to check my junk email at least a few times a day. Oh the joy.
The ‘Junk’ folder
I tend to make a folder called Junk inside my profile (C:\Users\Julian\Junk) where I stick any files that I haven’t yet decided where they should be (or if I need them at all!) Usually I just chuck everything from my Desktop into this folder when I’m done with it.
Saying that, I don’t usually keep anything on my Desktop at all. I only tend to use it for creation of content that is about to be uploaded or put into another project folder that I’m working on.
The ‘Downloads’ folder
Downloads probably the ‘buit in’ Windows folder that gets the most junk I have to sort out. Downloads tend to be a mixure of stuff you want to keep, stuff you wanted to just open to view, and (in my case as a developer) millions of documents that I’ve downloaded from one of Branded3’s internal tools.
Ahhh first world problems.