How To Overcome Digital Hoarding

Are you a hoarder? Do you know someone in your life who is a hoarder? Hoarding does not come from being lazy or having bad habits, but it’s getting too attached to your possessions to let go. Overcoming hoarding is not a one-day thing. If you managed to rearrange and tidy up your possessions, that doesn’t mean you have stopped being a hoarder. In fact, hoarding can take years to overcome. Here are some tips that will help you start overcoming hoarding.

How To Overcome Digital Hoarding Related
How To Overcome Digital Hoarding Effects

How to Stop Being a Hoarder

This used to take days to finish one single hoarding. Imagine having to paint multiple hoardings across Pune, or Mumbai. But now thanks to digital printers, one can get even hoardings (yes full. 5 Steps to Overcome Digital Hoarding 🧘‍♀️ 1. Create a System 💾 The first ingredient necessary to overcome Tsundoku is a unified, collaborative, team-wide system for storing, organizing, and retrieving data.

Recognise what hoarding is.
Learn to navigate your emotions, trauma and imperfection.
More is not necessary
Understand that not being able to decide the use of something doesn’t mean you need to keep it.
Categorise your items.
Don’t overthink.

Recognise What Hoarding Is

It’s not easy to deal with a problem when you don’t know much about it. The first step to dealing with hoarding is recognising what is hoarding and what is not. Hoarding has been studied and categorised as a mental disorder. By recognising it, you will be better prepared to seek the correct help to overcome it.

Learn to Get Over Emotions, Trauma, and Imperfection

You don’t have to deal with everything that comes your way on your own. Learn how to deal with your emotions. Don’t be afraid to open up and talk to someone you trust. Know that you don’t need to do a perfect job or make perfect decisions.

More is Not Necessary

There is really no need for you to have too many things. You don’t need old magazines, two microwaves or more than one bicycle. Try to get rid of the extras you don’t need.

Not Being Able to Decide the Use of Something Doesn’t Mean You Need to Keep It

You need to ask yourself questions about the things you have. Do you really use them or how likely are you to use them in the future? If there are items you have not used for years or you don’t know what they are used for, you probably can live without them.

Categorize Your Items

Start by making a pile of things that can be used and one for things that cannot be used. Take the pile of things that cannot be used and throw them away. Separate the pile of things that can be used into two: one you need and one for items you can either resell or donate. You might need to make more piles, but make sure you only keep the most important things you need in your home.

Don’t Overthink

It’s daunting to go through the de-cluttering process. You do not need to make your decisions complicated by overthinking about them. If you take more than minutes to make a decision about one item, you might be overthinking and complicating your decision. Stop, refocus and move on to another object.

Accepting that you have a hoarding problem is the first step to moving forward. You don’t have to go through the cleaning process alone; the expert technicians are here to help. We’ve been helping British Columbians like yourself with decluttering and organizing your space with great compassion for your unique situation. Contact 1^st Hoarding Clean Up today to reclaim your space and move forward from hoarding.

Cluttered computer desktop, a common example of digital hoarding.

Digital hoarding (also known as e-hoarding, datahoarding or cyberhoarding) is excessive acquisition and reluctance to delete electronic material no longer valuable to the user.^[1] The behavior includes the mass storage of digital artifacts and the retention of unnecessary or irrelevant electronic data. The term is increasingly common in pop culture, used to describe the habitual characteristics of compulsive hoarding, but in cyberspace. As with physical space in which excess items are described as 'clutter' or 'junk', excess digital media is often referred to as 'digital clutter'.^[2]^[3]^[4]

As a medical condition[edit]

Because of its non-physical nature, the condition does not show itself through physical clutter, meaning that it does not get classified as hoarding disorder.^[5] As a consequence, it is often not recognized as a medical condition.^[5] However, because digitization has greatly facilitated acquiring and storing large quanta of information (in terms of time and costs involved), digital hoarding tends to be a slow-moving progression, because even those affected by it do not display typical behaviors associated with hoarding.^[5]

How to overcome digital hoarding behavior

Related concepts[edit]

Digital clutter is the term often used to describe the resulting (digital) artifacts of digital hoarding, but it should not be understood as exclusively the result of hoarding. Digital clutter can be created as a side-effect of high occurrences of another user activity, such as the computer desktop icons created through frequent installation of applications. In such a case the clutter does not reflect the user's intent to hoard.

Housekeeping is the term often used to refer to the activity by which digital clutter moves out of the 'clutter' designation, either by being thrown away, or by the recognition of its importance, thus no longer making it part of the 'clutter'.

Virtual spaces[edit]

Digital hoarding occurs in any electronic spaces where information is stored. These are common areas where digital clutter may exist:

Excessive desktop icons
Old documents
Internet bookmarks no longer being referenced
Music and movie files
Old software/computer programs/apps no longer being used

A cluttered email inbox arises when a user does not have a system for archiving some messages and deleting others that are no longer wanted. Electronic documents can become clutter if a user does not delete extraneous files, or if the files are poorly organized (e.g. inconsistent folder structure, empty folders).

Some social media platforms also provide opportunity for digital hoarding. On the social networking siteFacebook, for example, one can accumulate a vast number of “friends” that may merely be acquaintances or lapsed contacts or even complete strangers.^[6]Groups and Pages can also contribute to clutter when users join and like new ones, respectively, without leaving or unfollowing those in which they are no longer interested.^[6]

Causes[edit]

Digital hoarding stems from a variety of individual traits and habits, corporate conditions, and societal trends:

Some individuals experience anxiety when faced with disposing of digital items,^[7] particularly if they fear losing something important.^[8]
Many digital hoarders don't know how to organize their digital content or aren't in the habit of doing so, and they lack a methodology for determining which content is worth keeping.^[7]
Keeping all of one's digital files requires less time and effort than evaluating and deleting them.^[9]
Many businesses rely on email correspondence for decision-making and formal approvals, so employees are often careful to keep work emails in case they are needed to verify a decision later.
Data storage devices are now so large and inexpensive that individuals and companies often do not feel the need to save data selectively.^[10]^[11]
The widespread availability and rapid dissemination of open content on the Internet makes it easier for users to obtain digital media, which can accumulate more quickly than ever.
Since digital media do not take up physical space, they're less likely to be perceived as clutter, and users can more easily forget the extent of what they own.
Unlike many physical items, electronic content does not age or decay on its own; users must consciously choose to delete it.^[12]

Repercussions[edit]

Digital hoarding can lead to many problems:

Excessive digital content takes up more hard drive space than it merits, and may even require the addition of extra digital storage to one's computer or mobile phone.
Server farms use more electricity as they need more disk drives. The extra load is especially notable in corporate domains.^[13] This adds to an individual's or company's electricity expenses and carbon footprint.^[13]
Digital clutter can be mentally draining, requiring time and attention. For example, hoarded emails can make an inbox seem overwhelming. The user wastes time sifting through excess emails, which can result in lowered employee productivity.^[14]
Digital hoarding can create an unhealthy attachment to digital content and foster a sort of “media addiction.”^[2] It is often good for one's mental health to let go of useless clutter, and decluttering digital devices can help with decluttering the mind.^[15]

In the media[edit]

Many American documentary television series depict the struggles of compulsive hoarders, such as Hoarding: Buried Alive on TLC and Hoarders on A&E. These shows have popularized awareness of hoarding, showing the consequences of accumulating clutter. However, these programs usually focus on physical hoarding. The WPTV story of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, resident Larry Fisher is a notable exception. This program focused on digital hoarding, depicting Fisher's longstanding refusal to delete any digital content. Instead, Fisher purchased an additional computer every time he ran out of hard drive space.^[16] The BBC News story of Washington, D.C., resident Chris Yurista expresses a counterpoint to this perspective. The program portrayed Yurista as a '21st century minimalist' for living with hardly any physical assets, substituting digital goods wherever possible.^[17]

Criticism[edit]

Though digital hoarding is often given a negative connotation, some^[who?] counter that it is not an unhealthy or detrimental practice. One argument^{[citation needed]} states that a large amount of digital content is not a problem in itself; rather, the problem is content findability. The size of the World Wide Web illustrates this point: a vast amount of content is available, but search engines such as Google have mastered effective algorithms for instantaneous findability. Digital hoarding can also be logical for email correspondence. Businesses often use email as the primary form of communication, so deleting conversations and documents that seem unimportant could be problematic if they are needed later.^[18]Disk storage is increasingly abundant and inexpensive, so concern over the cost of digital hoarding is rarely necessary. In addition, digital hoarding is clearly more benign than physical hoarding^{[medical citation needed]}, which is more visible and takes up physical space.^[9] Finally, on a subjective level^{[by whom?]}, digital hoarding can hardly be viewed as problematic if the consumer simply does not feel burdened by their collection of digital data.

References[edit]

^Davis, Nicola (2018-10-08). 'Cyberchondria and cyberhoarding: is internet fuelling new conditions?'. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2018-10-09.
^ ^a^bAlan, Henry. 'How to Break Your Media Addiction and Clean Up Your Digital Clutter'. Lifehacker. Archived from the original on 2018-02-10. Retrieved 2018-02-09.
^Becker, Joshua. '25 Areas of Digital Clutter to Minimalize'. Becoming Minimalist.
^'Putting an End to Digital Clutter'(PDF). Trend Micro.
^ ^a^b^c'The Invisible Weight of Digital Hoarding – MEL Magazine'. MEL Magazine. 2016-01-13. Retrieved 2018-10-09.
^ ^a^bCabellon, Ed. 'Stop Digital Hoarding'. EDUniverse. Archived from the original on 2014-04-08. Retrieved 2014-04-08.
^ ^a^bBeck, Melinda. 'Drowning in Email, Photos, Files? Hoarding Goes Digital'. The Wall Street Journal.
^Davidson, Jim. 'Combating 5 Signs of Digital Hoarding Behavior'. ClickZ.
^ ^a^bCase, Amber. 'Digital Hoarding'. Cyborg Anthropology.
^'Definition of: e-hoarder'. PCMag.
^Gatchelian, Gayle. 'Hoarding the ethereal: How we have more things (and more problems) but with less clutter'(PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2015-12-24. Retrieved 2014-04-09.
^Fogarty, Kevin. 'Digital Hoarding: Do We Have a Problem?'. Network Computing.
^ ^a^bSloane, Stanton D. 'The Problem With Packrats:The High Costs Of Digital Hoarding'. Forbes.
^Egan, Marsha. 'Pro: Don't Litter In Your Electronic Yard'. Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on 2014-02-17. Retrieved 2014-04-08.
^Hill, Simon. 'Is Digital Hoarding Dragging You Down?'. Digital Trends.
^Anfinsen, Jason. 'E-hoarding is a new phenomenon that is quickly spreading amongst computer users'. WPTV. Archived from the original on 2014-08-08. Retrieved 2014-04-08.
^Danzico, Matthew. 'Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive'. BBC News.
^Waller, John. 'Con: Why Delete That Which Takes Up No Space?'. Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on 2014-02-17. Retrieved 2014-04-08.