Digital Hoarding: The Clutter we don’t see

In your life, you would have come across certain people, whose digital storage spaces like Google Mail, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc are perpetually brimming with emails, documents, photos, videos and assorted digital information. They would continue hoarding their digital collection for many years, just in case it has a purpose in the future. This behavior is attributed to digital hoarding and is akin to a dragon guarding its hoarded treasure.

What makes you a Digital Hoarder?

Digital hoarding behavior can be identified by the way your digital storage space or computer is organized. Is it flooded with unread mails, spam, photos, apps, documents, forgotten downloads, unnecessary data that you should have deleted? Do you find it arduous to access information on your computer or digital storage apps due to the vast amount of disorganized files? Holding on to or keeping excessive amount of files that clutter your digital space is known as digital hoarding. 

In the physical world, hoarding behavior is attributed to people who have a compulsive need to collect a lot of objects or assorted trinkets to the point that the clutter disrupts their daily life. Recent research studies have revealed that we tend to hoard an inordinate amount in the digital world as well, without recognizing the repercussions of doing so.

Digital hoarding behavior occurs when a person has an obsessive urge to accumulate digital data and store it on their digital devices like phones, laptops, tablets and computers. People exhibiting this behavior are not inclined to delete or discard irrelevant digital information and tend to let the data clutter their digital storage spaces.

Why do we Hoard our files?

There can be multiple drivers that enable us to hold on to our digital possessions, including perfectionism, anxiety, compliance, disengagement, collection and preservation of memories, etc. According to a research study published in the journal Interacting with Computers, digital hoarding at the workplace is categorized into four types:

• Anxiety-driven digital hoarding: People driven by anxiety are keen on keeping their files rather than deleting them, as these files are perceived as valuable and preserving them provides a sense of comfort. They might strongly feel that the digital files are their own and share them only when absolutely necessary. These people have a sense of fear or anxiety about losing or accidentally deleting the files required in the future.

• Compliance-driven digital hoarding: People whose hoarding behavior is majorly driven to comply with workplace policies tend to store digital files in case it is needed for an audit or for other work-related purposes. They do not feel a sense of ownership over the data and are more likely to share it with their employers and colleagues when required.

• Disengagement-driven digital hoarding: People who are driven by a sense of disengagement tend to accumulate a vast amount of digital files over time and feel a total lack of control over them. The digital files are more likely to be disorganized and these people feel lazy or unbothered to delete the data. They also believe that keeping their data organized will take a lot of time out of their schedule.

• Collection-driven digital hoarding: People in this category purposefully collect information and choose not to delete their digital content. They are more likely to keep their digital files labeled and systematically organized for easy access. Spam, phishing mails, promotional information, etc are some of the exceptions they would delete to preserve space for their extensive collection. The data collected is perceived as an indispensable resource intended for future endeavors. These people take pride in their digital collection and also might enjoy a sense of novelty while preserving the newly acquired files.

Consequences of digital hoarding:

When we keep cluttering our digital space, there are bound to be some consequences:

• If we are constantly searching for important documents in an extremely disorganized system, we would end up spending more time than necessary to locate them. As a result of having accumulated data in a cluttered digital workspace, our productivity and work efficiency gets severely impacted. 

• Holding on to outdated or data that might contain private or sensitive information can increase our vulnerability to cybersecurity risks, insider threats and identity theft. There is also the added risk of accidentally releasing or losing important documents. 

• When we spend a lot of our time collecting and hoarding data, we might end up with extremely poor posture and our eyes can become strained from constantly looking at digital devices. 

• Accumulating large amounts of data will require a colossal amount of storage space and computers or any other gadgets might slow down due to the space occupied by irrelevant data. We will be forced to upgrade our digital storage space by buying extra hard disks or paid subscriptions to accommodate the space needed.

• Our digital storage spaces have cloud or data servers, which use a considerable amount of energy to store, sync and maintain our stored data. The more data we accumulate, the larger our negative impact on the environment.

• Spending time in a disorganized digital environment can overload or overstimulate our mind, making it difficult to concentrate on our tasks. It can also significantly impair these cognitive processes of our mind: decision making, problem-solving, memory and learning.

• Maintaining a large and cluttered database can be overwhelming for anyone. It can cause considerable stress, anxiety and other mental concerns. Accidentally losing important data can also lead to stress, guilt, shame and sadness as people who hoard digital data form a strong emotional attachment to the information they accumulate or store.

• When we are preoccupied with our digital environment, we might end up being irritable or overwhelmed when interacting with other people. Our social relationships can be affected due to digital hoarding behavior. When someone points out the problematic behaviors associated with hoarding, they might usually be met with defiance or resistance, thereby causing a strain in the relationship.

• Research studies have linked hoarding with anthropomorphism (tendency to give human emotions, traits and behavior to inanimate objects or in this case to digital information). For example, a person might refuse to delete outdated data from a game that they no longer play, stating that the computer will lose its precious memories, despite knowing that the computer is a device that merely stores data and not memories.

Read More: The Psychology Behind Hoarding Behaviour

How to Curb digital hoarding behaviors?

One of the most effective steps towards limiting our tendency for digital hoarding lies in shifting our mindset and combining that with these strategies:

• If you are prone to hoarding memes, pictures, videos, documents, etc because there’s plenty of digital storage available, you can reduce the storage limit to keep only the useful data.

• Enabling auto-delete features on apps and devices can save a lot of time and efforts. Before adding this feature to your app, ensure that you have a backup of the extremely vital files.

• To make it easier to find files while searching for them, you can label them appropriately as you create them. By doing this, your digital environment will be clutter-free. For example, our Desktop space is usually filled to the brim with documents, files, apps etc that need to either be moved to a different location or labeled more effectively for easier accessibility. 

• Using automated apps that help to clean or organize your digital device can be another alternative to prevent digital hoarding. Duplicate photos, documents, irrelevant data can be deleted by these apps systematically.

• Introduce minimalism into your digital environment to avoid the negative effects of cognitive overload. Question yourself if you actually need that particular file/meme/photo/document/video and further ask yourself if you’re keeping it for reasons that aren’t relevant or practical.

• While practicing the above strategies, remind yourself that files only serve their purpose based on how we perceive or use them. Our true memories and emotions associated with something are already a part of our mind and we don’t always need a digital copy of our precious moments. 

Conclusion

As opposed to hoarding physical objects, digital hoarding might seem like it’s not taking up much space but it can definitely take up a lot of your mental space if left unaddressed. A common attribute of digital hoarding is that it often goes unnoticed! We might not even realize that we are crowding up our digital environment by accumulating sizeable data in a seemingly infinite space but our unread mails, irrelevant documents, outdated data, duplicates, etc do take up considerable space and end up flooding our devices. To conclude, it is crucial to keep our digital space clean and organized to continue working seamlessly.

FAQs

1. What is Digital Hoarding?

Digital hoarding is a behavioral tendency of accumulating too much of digital content such as emails, files, documents, photos, videos, software, etc. 

2. How to identify Digital Hoarding Behaviors?

Here are some of the most common indicators of digital hoarding: difficulty deleting digital content, feeling anxious, overwhelmed, guilty or stressed about deleting digital content, and attaching excessive or unnecessary importance to data. 

3. How to stop hoarding digital content?

By having a minimalist digital environment, automating deletion of files you haven’t used or don’t need, organizing and labeling your files systematically, removing duplicate copies of data, setting storage limits, and by addressing any underlying anxieties about losing important information by creating a backup of only the critical data that you need.