rechelle's lifelyrics

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “If you haven’t used [a thing] in 2 years, and you don’t anticipate needing it in the next year, get rid of it.” Well, I would say I consistently work at streamlining stuff, knowing what I have and why I have it, and getting rid of the stuff that I’m not using (including clothes, makeup, and kitchen tools to name a few). But I have a confession to make. It has been many years that I have accumulated digital files that have been growing to the point of complete absurdity if I think about the space they would occupy in physical form.

Recently, I cleaned out most of our physical household file folders and discovered our will was beyond outdated. I began researching what we should do to make sure we’re prepared for the inevitable, so it doesn’t become a big administrative burden on either of us who may survive each other, or for our children if, or when, they have to deal with us leaving this life. The more I’ve learned about what others have gone through during probate for a loved one’s estate and what can be done to have a successfully prepared estate, the more I’ve thought about our stuff that means something to us — but may become another big job for someone else to deal with after we’re gone.

I’ve been paying for a cloud storage for close to 2 decades, and it has been so easy to upload all of our photos and videos, recordings, documents, and whatever else we have worked on through the years without thinking about the space we are consuming. I mean, for the most part, it’s orderly with naming conventions to keep the priority folders or items at the top of the lists, etc. But for some reason, the knowledge that we have accumulated 800 Gigabytes of data in our cloud warehouse has me feeling uneasy. It’s like I’ve been paying for a storage shed, and it’s full of boxes containing stuff I’ve forgotten about, or worse, will never again use. I’m sure it’s not going to mean a hill of beans to anyone else, so why am I continuing to store all of this?

Now that I’m aware of this conundrum, I’ve decided I’m going to apply the policy, “Clean Before You Go” to my digital warehouse. I know it’s no small task, believe me. But when I think of the fact we’ve lived in our new home for a little over 5 years, I realize the weeding out and cleaning takes years to complete. When we first moved in, we had so much to do, we just put things away “for now.” Through the years, I’ve organized each closet and storage space within these walls and gotten rid of the things we don’t need or use any more. I know where everything is, and everything has a designated space. So, I’m ready to tackle our invisible shed in the sky, and plan to pare it down to a practical storage space for our files and keepsakes.

If you’d like to know more about efficient ways to organize and store digital files, leave a comment or email me! I’d be happy to share more “housekeeping” strategies I’ve used in my administrative-assistant-type work.