Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts (Premium)

This is a big one.

Like many of the other digital decluttering tasks I'm taking on this year, reorganizing my online accounts was long overdue. And for some of the same reasons. Key among them is that doing so can be complicated and time-consuming, especially when you need to move 100s of GBs of data around. This is literally why procrastination exists.

But when I realized I could move my video archive to what used to be my personal YouTube channel and make it available publicly, in doing so saving lots of space on my NAS and in my cloud storage services, I got the push I needed to try and make it work. And so I started the difficult and detail-oriented process of rethinking which accounts I use for personal and work-related tasks, respectively. And then I started making the moves.

Personal and work. Work and personal. It's all a jumble.

To be clear, this problem was self-imposed. Like many, I've opened accounts at every imaginable email service over the years, and like many, I even have multiple accounts at some of these services, like Gmail and Outlook.com. I've also used various custom domains over the years, attaching them to different consumer- and business-oriented services as possible. If it's email- and online account-related, I've done it.

But a few accounts have persisted over the years and shown staying power. I created my original Microsoft account, on Hotmail, in 1999 to sign up for Xbox Live Gold. I created my first Gmail account in June 2014 to test the then-new service. And I've had an Apple ID since whenever that started; my first App Store purchase occurred in January 2009. All of these accounts still exist, indeed, all of these accounts are still active.

But my key online account, of course, is [email protected], part of my Thurrott.com domain, which I had been using for personal needs until I agreed to join BWW Media Group in late 2014. That December, I met with the team outside of Chicago and hashed out a number of things, but the most important, perhaps, was the brand. What could we use to go live with? My previous site and its contents, and my core online identity since 1999, the SuperSite for Windows, was owned by Penton, and finding a relevant new domain was difficult.

But I owned Thurrott.com, and everyone but me thought it was the obvious choice, the best choice. I pushed back because my last name is hard to spell and pronounce, and because I would lose the domain that is my name: what if BWW pulled a Penton and just decided to keep the site we had created and its domain? George, the owner, assured me that I would never lose my identity, and that even if everything fell apart between us, I'd retain the rights to Thurrott.com, both the brand and the site's contents. (And he came through on that promise 8 years later, as you may know.)

Since then, I've been using my primary email address, [email protected], for both personal and work purposes while using Thurrott.com for the site and my online i...