I did post on it back in October, and I seem to be no farther ahead now in taming the e-mail monster than I was back then–except that now I have my burgeoning collection of e-mails neatly categorized and labeled! Just too busy to deal with the issue lately. But I do know that I’ll have to do something about it soon!

Jeanne

If I could add #4 to your list, I’d add “deleting data,” because once we realize we’ve created a data monster, the only way to correct the problem is by deleting unnecessary data–and this, in itself, is very time-consuming.

I’m experiencing this problem with e-mail. It’s too easy to archive e-mails we believe we might want or need later–especially potentially important business communications. Archiving gets these messages out of our inboxes but can turn our archives into an absolute horror story, making us afraid to even check to see how many messages we’ve got “saved for a rainy day”! (In fact, even my inbox is a horror story, right now! Uggghhh!)

The job of keeping on top of our data becomes so much bigger than it needs to be once we’ve saved everything (instead of getting rid of the unnecessary stuff to begin with), because we’re then required to wade through and sort massive amounts of data to decide what to keep and what not to–a huge undertaking and one that, at this stage, becomes far too easy to put off for later, making the problem even worse!

Great post topic! More of us need to be reminded about the data monster!

Jeanne