Declutter Tuesday – Corporate Policy

Decluttering by picking stuff out of a pile for disposal is not working. It’s not working for me.

CC License photo credit: Paul Hammond

Tonight, just before I left the office, an email from IT caught me off guard and, shortly after, gave me inspiration.

The email was a notice to all employees that a new policy regarding data management was going to be implemented to save the company time and resources. The premise: email older than 180 days will automatically be deleted from every user’s inbox.

No exception, no excuses.

Just two weeks left before kick-off, last chance to save the “office gems” — don’t we all have them? Email arguments, best-of-the-year faux-pas and email etiquette breakage. And of course, the life-saving-maybes and other got-myself-covered emails in case someone comes to question your judgement in a few months…

At first, I thought: data storage can’t be that expensive, what’s the big deal! Let my archives flourish and build my history, my background, my memory.

But then, it started to make sense… why bother?

Save what you need when it comes around, right then and now; you can keep the rest floating around for 6 months until it automatically disappears. If it was that important you WILL know and remember to save it, share it, print it, or do whatever you want with it.

Genius!

This is exactly what I’m going to do for my on-going declutter “life project”. Instead of picking things to throw out, I will be picking out the things I must keep!

When stuff piles up, I should assume it will be trashed by the end of the day and promptly pull the essentials out, and put them where they belong.

And then… discard piles at a time. How satisfying this must be!

I need renewed inspiration to continue decluttering, please link up your own challenges.

Tell me I’m not alone. Or am I?

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