Are you a digital packrat?
My laptop was running slow (as usual) and I was cursing Microsoft - usual too :) .
I tried various tweaks including turning off fancy graphics and deleting temporary files.
Final step - defragment the disk.
This is where i met my nemesis - it took 4 hrs and 26 minutes to defragment a 40GB disk - something was wrong!!!
Enter WINDIRSTAT. The software obliged me with a “treemap” which is a pictorial representation of the space in my hard drive.
I was looking at acres and acres of browns and blacks and had absolutely no idea what they were. Away I went, drilling down each folder and realized that I had “stuff” - lots and lots and lots of stuff, starting from emails from my first project 5 years back for my job right down to information on restaurants in a city which i left 2 years back.
Too much useless stuff had been stored too long and I was turning into a digital packrat. Being a GTD enthusiast, I realized that most should go into my Read/Review folder. First step - put all that stuff in a separate folder and mark it Read/Review (after deleting the old email and the restaurant list).
Size of the folder - 12 GB.
It dawned on me that i didn’t want to spend the rest of the year going through stuff which was in my Read/Review. About 3 GB was stuff on projects which I had thought were very interesting at some point - including learning mandarin and an audio book of robert kiyosaki’s. Now I know that I prefer the English speaking world to Chinese and mutual funds to lotteries :) Chop chop chop. Ok - 9GB is still very big.
The next step was looking at when the files were last accessed. A significant chunk (about 4GB) was lying in the folders from 2003 and had not been modified even once. Down the digital drain they went.
Of the last 5 GB, about 2 GB was tech manuals on software i had used, was currently using or was planning to use in the future. Rationalizing respectively that I hated stuff I had used, copy code from google for the software I am currently using and can probably get away with managing people in future instead of being forced to learn new things, i deleted the manuals.
Running a defrag at this point took only 20 minutes. So I have decided to procrastinate on cleaning the remaining 3 GB and will instead offer you a few words of wisdom based on my experience :
1. Looking at your junk in browns and blacks rather than the usual List view spurs you into action.
2. Use bookmarks for stuff instead of downloading the files so that I can fit in a later post on deleting and oraganizing them.
3. If you haven’t read a manual in 2 years, the software or hardware is outdated.
4. Nobody asks information on projects more than a year old ‘cos they would lose their ability to blame it all on you.
5. You don’t have to read (or file for later reading) emails from your aunt as she does not know how to put a read receipt.
6. When you delete stuff, your laptop feels lighter :)
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POSTED IN: gtd, tips and tricks, web/tech
4 opinions for Are you a digital packrat?
hyjak
Jul 23, 2007 at 5:02 am
I think this is a nightmare that atleast 50% of users experience:D We just tend to keep adding and adding and installing and installing. The drive gets suffocated and turns asthmatic when its fragmented as well. Both together turn it into a crawlie that makes you want to pull out your hair. Nice tips to prevent that. Most importantly, never procrastinate:)
jdiver
Aug 6, 2007 at 7:21 am
For visualizing disk usage on Windows PCs, I prefer the program Scanner written by Steffen Gerlach. It uses a pie chart to show disk usage. It is simple to use, very fast and small. You can right-click on items to zoom in, open folders in Windows Explorer, and remove files. It is a single executable file that does not need to be installed. I keep it on my flash drive so I can run it on any Windows PC. I have tried using many other programs to analyze my disk usage but I always end up coming back to this one.
jdiver
Aug 6, 2007 at 7:24 am
You can download Steffen Gerlach’s Scanner here:
http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
SilverDelta
Aug 7, 2007 at 6:38 am
OMG! 4 h 26 min to defrag a 40 GB drive? You need to defrag more regularly :O Diskeeper takes < 5-10 min on my 160GB drive, but I defrag regularly (once a week) to prevent fragmentation build-up.
Make sure you have atleast 15-20% free space, it will hasten the defrag process.
Run diskcleanup or Ccleaner to clean out the temp files and junk from the drive and to reclaim some more space.
Then run defrag with a good defragger like Diskeeper, and it will take only a short time even for larger drives. If you are the proscrastinating type :D then turn on the auto defrag mode on diskeeper, and it will defrag the drives automatically whenever the PC is not busy and you wont have to bother about it anymore.