At the beginning of this year, we teamed up with digital productivity expert Deb Lee to educate people about the importance of digital organization. As we continue our mission to help you conquer the clutter, we decided to take a look at just how messy your digital workspaces are. We recently surveyed over 650 professionals in the United States about their current digital organization habits. Here’s what we discovered:
Nearly 30% of professionals have more than 100 files on their desktop alone
On this week’s episode of ‘Hoarders’, we take a peek into the lives of those who haven’t seen their desktop wallpaper in years (kidding). All jokes aside, storing that many files on your desktop can create all sorts of problems. Aside from the unnecessary stress and distraction it causes, searching through unorganized files to find that one photo can be a huge time-waster. And when you're collaborating with colleagues on a project and need to share files, they're no good to anyone buried in the depths of your desktop.
Nearly 30% admit to never (ever!) organizing their digital files
Never?! For a company in the business of organizing, we found this stat to be pretty surprising, especially when there's so many digital organization methods and tools available online today. For those of you who need some inspiration to clean out your digital closets, take a tip from productivity expert Deb Lee—schedule monthly maintenance days to review digital content and remove duplicates, and designate the last 10-15 minutes of each day to organizing the digital files you’re currently working on.
70% store files on their computer’s hard drive
While your hard drive might have been an obvious place to store your files 15 years ago, it just doesn't cut it when you think about how much content is flying around these days. With the growth of cloud-based solutions that can manage files more productively and efficiently, it doesn't make sense to keep your documents on your laptop alone.
If you’ve ever received the frustrating ‘Your storage is almost full’ pop-up—or worse—if your computer’s ever crashed, you know all too well the reasons why you shouldn’t keep all of your files on a hard drive. Unlike the cloud, if your documents are living on your computer, it’s impossible for you to work with your teammates on projects in real-time, and there’s always the risk that you could lose everything if your laptop decides to kick the bucket.
40% say the first thing they delete to free up storage space are duplicate files
When trying to find a file within a digital mess, it’s sometimes just as easy to create a duplicate, because when you can't find it, it's easier (and faster) to simply download another. While this may work for you in the short-term, it'll eventually eat up your valuable storage space, and, when it comes to collaborative projects, make it much harder for your team to know which document is the right version.
If you fall into one of the above groups, or are interested in learning more about how to conquer the digital clutter in your worklife, check out these tips and tricks from Bynder and Deb Lee. Or, follow us on Twitter @bynder.
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