Are you sure you want to delete these 64 items?
No, of course I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure that there wasn’t something in there that I wouldn’t at some point half-remember having had and then spend hours looking for, unable to find it because today I deleted it. I was sure that I hadn’t looked at any of those things for long enough to know they were not crucial to my current happiness. That felt like a good enough reason to drop them into the ‘recycle’ bin – and then to empty the bin, without revisiting what I’d put in there. When the computer asked if I was sure, I said “Yes” – and they were gone forever.
Or not.
There’s always the chance that some of things came from the web in the first place and I could find them again if I really needed them. There’s always the chance (the certainty in at least one case) that I have myself posted them to the web and could find them again if I really needed them. There’s always the chance that they were just copies or versions of things that I have stored elsewhere.
When it comes to simplifying things my biggest most convoluted task is going to be getting my electronic storage into better order. This is going to take quite some time. I can’t even figure out whether I should delete first, or catalogue first, or try to do both in tandem.
I use the word ‘catalogue’ randomly. Not just loosely, but completely inaccurately. Virtually nothing in my electronic filing is systemised. Most of it is filed under loose categories and by date. By ‘date’ I mostly just mean ‘year’. It is no wonder I spend so much time looking for things I half-remember having had.
When I worked in an office, we had paper files and filing cabinets, we had colour coding, and date sequencing, and tabs for the important stuff. I could find any specific document from any year you asked me for within a very short space of time (assuming we had it). Those files have very recently been purged and mostly shredded. Were that not so, I could probably still have found you a specific document for a specific development, from, say, 1996, with ease (assuming we had it in the first place). Can I find you a poem or a photograph that I know I wrote or took the year before last? No. Can I even remember what year a particularly clear image is from? No.
My electronic filing system is on the face of it simpler – but in practical terms – it is pretty much useless. This raises the question (again) of what I mean by simple? Simple to file, or simple to retrieve? These are two counter-weighted objectives. I have been going with the wrong one, and I am not sure whether that is something that it is now worth the effort of trying to undo.
So. I’ll start with reducing the number of saved documents / images. That must help, no?
~
In a file labelled simply “2020” I find my overriding plan for the year, a list of competition entries (none of them successful as I recall), a spreadsheet detailing potential markets. I find reflection pieces on conversations and coaching sessions. It all speaks to who I was five years ago. It is all meaningless now. Delete, delete,delete.
I keep the document titled Moments, I read it and think yes, and yes, and oh dear, and yes. It is almost a character study of who I was in June 2020. What appeared to matter to me then. Some still does, some makes me wince, some simply shows me that the insights were not wasted, that I held (hold) on to some of them. Despite the plurality of the title, it is really a singular moment. I think my older self might want to read it again, maybe in another five years’ time.
I keep the one labelled (with a distinct lack of originality) 2020 Visions. This is essentially my prose and poetry diary of that strange year. I am sure I have this in hard copy as well…and hopefully backed up on one of the external hard drives. This one matters. I hope that someday, someone might read this.
I move on to the 2021 header folder. I keep 2021 Possibilities – the year in words and pictures again – but delete the duplicate copy of it, and the extract from it focussing on Burley-in-Wharfedale. I must have had reasons for keeping these separately. The gods only know what they might have been. The business card template still serves a purpose: I move it to the 2026 folder. I also move small compilations of poetic doodles to a more appropriate place, which is really just kicking the can down the road.
There are two things to check I have stored off-line when I get home (I'm starting the exercise in a rented flat by the sea). Solstice and other cards. Things I keep for potential recycling and/or sometimes to make sure I really don’t repeat them. Later I will find one is a duplicate & delete; the other isn’t so I will move it.
Which only leaves The Last Not Now Box – the cover sheet that is in the box in the loft. There may be other things to go into that box. There may be things to come out of it (temporarily). The cover sheet may need amending in due course.
I review today’s photos and delete the ones that just don’twork.
The recycle box asks if I am sure I want to permanently delete these 22 items. I am not. I click Yes.
2022… copies of pictures (for cards never made, stuff since sold or refurbished – used for pricing), a pictorial reference on how to find Sirius (why?), a journal format for someone who would never use it (variations on same), unpublished articles and research for same, details for some AirBnb I stayed in that year (I don’t remember it), a link to Surface Recovery (it didn’t work – the thing was, to use the technical expression, fried), a menu for a restaurant I don’t use, and an out-of-date one for the take-away that we do, an e-address list for some workshop or other…delete, delete,
delete.
I keep Emergence, which my words’n’pics diary of the year. I keep the files that show the work-in-progress on the bungalow and the garden. I keep a copy of Jenny Joseph’s Warning.
From 2023, I keep Cousin Craig’s Eulogy, delete a Xmas letter to a friend, the lunar calendar for the year, pictures of shuggy boats downloaded from the web. I keep a first draft of something that didn’t become anything, just in case one day it might…or I might be able to scavenge from it. My diary approach to the year lapsed in 2023.
I only skim my ‘commitments’ list for 2024, like it matters now. I keep the comps & subs list, mainly because it notes the few successes, the things that got into print. I also keep my review of the year, though I can’t bring myself to read it.
I decide 2025 is recent enough to not revisit. The Accounts folder is within the statutory retention period. The Attachments folder is empty and I have no idea why I created it. Bloggery is a working folder – when I go to copy it to the external drive, it tells me it has 450 items. Most of those are published blogs, so I’m not sure why I want this third copy – but I do – and it means I get to remove an earlier back-up from a different drive.
A whole folder for a poetry course that I never really got into – that goes – along with something for a photo-printing service that no longer exists. Book reviews from 2022 and 2023, the last year I did any serious reviewing, get copied to an external drive. Archives of what I thought about books on a first read are sometimes interesting to go back to – especially when (as I do) I re-read something almost to the end before remembering I’ve read it before, or when I got in on the ground floor of what became a phenomenon like the Twilight saga.
I find an obscurely named Custom Office Templates which it turns out holds a different version of One Ship I Was On… a work-in-progress…something I need to cross reference and sort out. Work done that I might otherwise have lost.
I can’t quite bring myself to fully delete my educational and professional CV from my former life, so I print a copy to put with all those certificates and school reports that are also now equally meaningless… then I let the electronic copy go. Other versions relating to my writing and personal life I move to the current year folder.
My recycle bin can’t be bothered to count how many items there are now; it simply asks if I am sure I want to delete them all. I am not. I click Yes.
I am about a third of the way through this first pass of clearing out my cloud-storage.
I keep going. Sometimes I move things, sometimes I ponder over whether or not to keep…the more I keep going the less I look. I figure that if I started this work-in-progress three years ago and the title means nothing to me, then clearly I’m not still working on it. Delete, delete, delete.
I eventually get to the bottom of my “documents” folders list. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve emptied the trash can. I’m getting emails from my provider warning me that I seem to have deleted a large number of files. That feels a little bit like my local council asking me if I’d noticed that my rubbish bin was full. I ignore it. Delete the message.
My final ‘empty’ are-you-sure? message tells me that it is deleting 479 items.
And of course I’m still not sure…but it doesn’t matter now…because they’re gone…and then I start on my WhatsApp Chats, and my email folders...so on it goes.
I really dread getting around to the photos.
