Ten years ago a friend of mine told me that an ideal computer desk would only be large enough to rest the base of the monitor on. The keyboard and mouse would similarly go into trays that are sized precisely for their use. His premise was that open desk space attracts clutter and quickly makes the space unusable. If there’s no extra space for stuff to collect on there is no clutter, and this particular problem is solved.

I can personally attest to this. The desk I built to house my computers and photography stuff has shelves that are largely filled with stuff that sits and doesn’t get used on anything approaching a frequent basis, although it does get used, and it’s too valuable to simply re-aquire when it is needed next. The surface of the desk slowly fills with stuff, until I start to purge again, and throw away or reorganize stuff yet again.

However, the physical clutter on my desk and shelves is smaller than my digital clutter problem. I have no problem throwing away physical things – that’s pretty easy for me, and always has been. Unfortunatley, I have a mental block about throwing out digital things. I’m a hoarder of files, and I think it’s finally starting to represent a significant cost. This comes from both organizational and performance perspectives:

I have well over 140,000 images in my Aperture library – and I’ve only started in the last few months deleting photos that are totally out of focus, or are black frames due to poor exposure or shooting with the lens cap on. A large percentage of the photos in my library were viewed when I imported them, and have never been accessed again. (Not that I would know, as I have atime disabled on my fileservers for performance reasons). I’m up to 1.6TB of image files. They are nested down in a shared filesystem, and I allow Aperture to manage this as best as I can, but it’s still pretty insane. I have almost no hope finding a single specific image without Aperture, and the Aperture Library is getting big enough to have a performance impact on my system (again). To keep the speed up for Aperture, I really need to move the 125GB library to an SSD. Let me tell you, those are cheap.

It’s also getting costly to keep adding more and more larger hard drives to the fileserver. The last time I did an upgrade, I replaced 4 of the 8 750GB drives in the pool with 1.5TB drives – and a year later I have less than 700GB free. It’s time to upgrade again, but my next purchase has to be a new desktop, which puts more drives off even further.

In reality, I need to buckle down and start deleting things that I can either re-create, dont need, or that I’m caching in the Cloud. I need to start reviewing images, deleting stuff I honestly don’t need, and putting the rest of it into cold storage. Further, anything on iTunes Match needs to get off the fileserver, as do the software package installers I’ve saved over the years.

It’s time to buckle down and clean.