Digital Junk

(August 2017) WRITING WEDNESDAY: If you have a pencil and paper, you can write. But we’ve made it much more complicated — with laptop computers, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, etc. For the past few weeks, I was having major problems with my laptop. The start-up disc kept filling up and when I attempted to find out what was eating the space, my computer indicated it was “Other.” I was madly trying to complete a couple of manuscripts and I couldn’t afford losing the time of taking my computer in to get repaired. I felt like I was sitting in a boat with a hole and as the water was entering my vessel, I was busy getting rid of unnecessary files to buy some more space. To make a long story short, it turned out e-mail messages were taking up 150G of my hard disk space! The problem has been remedied, my three-year-old computer system updated.

I did have to dump all my e-mails off of my laptop, and I have to admit that it has been surprisingly liberating. I feel like I have a fresh piece of paper without the weight of reminders of what I needed to do three years ago, not to mention the ubiquitous junk mail that seems to be sneaking into my Inbox. Marie Kondo has written about the merits of “tidying” up physical possessions, but for me, getting rid of my digital junk was the best move in my writing daily life.