While physical clutter impinges on your freedom in rather obvious ways (from "can't find a place to set this down" to "can't find a path to the door!"), electronic clutter is sneakier in its destruction. Physical clutter gets in the way of your functioning, while its electronic cousin gets in the way of your functioning and your computer's functioning.
You're familiar with the frustration when you can't find what you need, or it isn't where you thought it was. Or you've changed a file title so many times that you can't tell one version from another. Or just looking at your hard drive's directory folder makes you want to shut the whole thing down for the day.
When you get organized, you develop systems (for folder arranging and file naming, say) and tools (like Google Desktop for finding specific things in documents) to help you make sense of all your electronic files. You streamline your hard drive, eliminate duplicates, back up your files regularly and archive what you don't need onto external storage. That frees up lots of electronic space, which can have some unexpected benefits.
Just like you tend to spread out physical stuff as you work, your computer's processor "spreads out" into your hard drive space as it works on stuff. In general, if your hard drive has less than half of its total capacity available as free space, your computer is probably not working at its optimal efficiency. To keep your processor working fast, it helps to have as much free space on your hard drive as possible.
I can't dictate exactly what to keep, what to archive and what to trash on your computer in just one blog post. (I can come up with a plan for that with you if we work together.) But I'd like to encourage you to start looking through your hard drive and seeing what improvements you could make.
Have any of you thought about getting your hard drive sorted out? What have you done, and how has it worked? Let me know in the comments!
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