Clutter can also be digital...

Today I have spent almost 9 hours cleaning up my "digital clutter."  Nine hours.

When I got a new camera last Christmas, I also bought a 32GB memory card, which is awesome, until I stopped deleting the pictures off the card in September.  Since I am horribly afraid of losing even one picture with a special memory attached, I went through the entire memory card today.  I had already copied most of the pictures onto my computer (without deleting them off the card), so I know there is no reason for the duplicates.  Plus, we're on vacation this week, so I don't want to take a chance of wanting to take a picture of a special moment only to see "memory card full."  Also, because I am borderline psychotically organized, the photos on my computer were in folders by event, including special folders for the ones I posted on Facebook within almost every event.  I cleared my memory card of everything except this vacation, and was feeling pretty good about it.  Unfortunately, when I checked to see how much space is left on the card, I saw this:

And even though I copied all my pictures and documents onto an external hard drive a few months ago, I am still terrified to lose them.  And what if I lose the external hard drive?  It's so small!

Last summer, for the first time ever, I started going through the pictures on my computer and deleting the duplicates and bad pictures.  Why I had let them build up for the past 15 years (or whenever it was that I got my first digital camera), I have no idea.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes I remember to delete the duplicate/bad pictures, but more often that not, I simply don't take the time to deal with it.  I still work on this when I have spare time and am in the mood to delete things, but I'm not finished yet.  Plus, I am constantly adding to the pictures.

Does anyone else have this problem?  And don't even get my started on my documents.  I literally have papers I wrote in high school on my current computer.  I graduated high school in 2003.  Whenever I got a new computer, I simply transferred all my documents and pictures onto the new computer.  Because, you know, I might need that paper I wrote for environmental science class one day.

So, this is just a small snippet of my process of trying to get rid of clutter.  However long it takes, it does feel good to have a little bit less each day.  :)