Digital Decluttering: Taking It On the Road (Premium)

As I wrote in Digital Decluttering: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned (Premium), I ran into multiple roadblocks while juggling far too many projects, so I scaled back my ambitions and came up with a slightly more reasonable goal: I would try to complete three specific final digital decluttering tasks before heading to Mexico City this coming Friday, October 13. (We'll be there for three weeks during the second half of October and the beginning of November.)

Those tasks were:

Completely re-upload and publish the ~300 videos to the Thurrott.com YouTube channel because I had previously published them to the wrong channel like a doofus.
Finish organizing the photo and document scans that I had scanned in over a frenetic weekend in mid-September and sync them to all versions of my personal document archives and photo collection.
Combine the photo collections in Google Photos and OneDrive/NAS into one true collection and then sync it everywhere because my Google Photos collection was not as complete as I had thought.

And I did pretty well overall, though I wasn't surprised that I didn't have time to get it all done given the time commitment that each requires.

I am happy to report that the YouTube upload/publishing job is now complete, and you can view the results at the official Thurrott.com YouTube channel, where you will find many organizational playlists our entire First Ring Daily episode catalog, and a lot more.

I have made progress with but have not completed the scanning organizational task, but I did get about one-third of it done, and those finalized scans have synced to all versions of my personal document archives and photo collection.

And … I have made absolutely no progress on the photo collection work because it is a daunting process that involves several hundred gigabytes of what is inarguably my most important data.

Given all that, I have of course adjusted the schedule. And now I'm going to try to make some progress on those two unfinished projects in Mexico City while also uploading the (small) remainder of my video archive to the correct channel for the first time. And do all that while working to update the Windows 11 Field Guide for Windows 11 version 23H2, work that will take precedence over my digital decluttering stuff. But I'll do some of each.

Each of these requires a bit of logistical work.

I already neatly organized my document archives and photo collection in OneDrive as part of all that digital decluttering work I did between August and September. Since then, I ran into some new OneDrive issues in Windows 10 version 23H2, which I'm using across multiple PCs so that I can work on the book, and so I took the scary but very successful step of reorganizing all of my OneDrive folders. So I'm in good shape there.

To do the existing scan organization work, I use a folder called 2023-09 final scans in the root of my Photos folder in OneDrive, and I sync that to all my PCs (it's abou...