Digital Decluttering: Detail Work, Final Paper Scans (Premium)

This article series was inspired by our move from a large house into a small apartment and the amount of decluttering we needed to do in its wake. I had thought that I was good at decluttering, but what I came to understand is that what I was really doing---what I was really good at---was organizing the clutter. Sure, I threw stuff away, but I was also hiding clutter and creating the illusion of organization.

This process, very common to those with ADHD, now has a name, “doom pile,” where “doom” stands for “didn’t organize, only moved.” The fallout from this behavior, which I guess I’ve engaged in my entire adult life, is that we had more stuff than we had space for. And so I once again resolved to declutter, this time hopefully more effectively, and whittle down further, so that when we moved again---which we are absolutely going to do---there would be less crap to lug around and store.

When I first wrote about this back in May, I was thinking mostly in terms of physical clutter, as we had moved a disappointing amount of old electronics whose collective fate would be some combination of being recycled, given away, or sold. And I also had an IKEA shelving (or storage) unit with bins, some full of items I use and need regularly, and some filled with items I would need to declutter. Among that latter group was a pile of paper-based photos, documents, newspaper clippings, kids’ drawings, and the like, items I would want to scan in, organize digitally, and then discard.

My wife and I first chipped away at the electronics---it’s still not done, but we made some progress---and then we spent most of July in Mexico. I was ready to start this work as soon as we got home, and I expanded its scope to include the digital declutter of my personal and work archives, which were scattered between OneDrive, my NAS, Google Photos, and elsewhere. What I realized was that I had been making the same clutter organizational mistakes, or doom piling, digitally just as I had been with physical items. That is, my document, photo, and other archives on the NAS and in the cloud had the appearance of being organized, but were not, in fact, organized at all. Ultimately, I decided to start with the digital decluttering and then move on to the paper scanning.

Over the next 5 or 6 weeks, I experienced something very much unexpected. Instead of giving up partway through this work, which seemed inevitable given history and how tedious it can be, I roared through it in an effective and successful manner and completed that work. And given this success I further expanded the scope of this project yet again and decided to fully organize my other digital archives---home videos, music, and videos---rethink my personal and work online accounts, and start researching a new NAS, as mine is old and out of date.

And I finally began scanning the paper-based items that I meant to start with, first by organizing them into logical groups and tossing out ...