New Year, new you… or so the saying goes.
Every year many of us (like myself) make New Year Resolutions which are usually broken by the first week of January 
. But this year, it’s going to be different.
Firstly, my NYR’s this year are a little more generic than specific. ‘I will not drink any more coffee’ is just too specific and doomed from the start especially as my journey takes me past the coffee machine every morning as I walk through the office to my desk and I’m already drinking my second cup of the day as I type this...
This year it’s going to be all about decluttering my life both physically and digitally. I’ve already made a start on clearing out the ‘physical’ with my attic and getting rid of the stuff that has accumulated up there, old ornaments, books I don’t read anymore, empty boxes for gadgets I own (why do we always keep those?) although I did have a lot of fun going through my old schoolwork files (Note to self: my NYR of ‘No Magpieing’ i.e. getting distracted by something else during a task, needs to be crossed off and re-added to the NYR 2018 list) and laughing at some of the comments my classmates used to write in the margins from across their desk, as well as fondly looking through some of the pictures my youngest brother drew for me when he was a toddler (he’s now 33 with a toddler of his own). It’s relatively easy to sort out physical objects into piles of stuff to keep, stuff to throw away and stuff to recycle (charity shops, ebay etc), but is it as easy to clear out your digital ‘stuff’ too?
I was given my first digital camera back in 2001 a Fuji Finepix 4700 (which was up in the attic incidentally) and ever since then I've been snapping pictures of everything that catches my eye. Needless to say, I have thousands and thousands of digital photos, most of which I’ve never looked at again, taking up space on my personal cloud server as well as on various large capacity portable hard drives I have. So this year I’m going to be going through them all, each and every one, to either delete, or tag and keep. Why tag I hear you say? Well I’ve never bothered to tag any of the photos I’ve taken and have recently been introduced to the power of tagging (through working on this Engineering Communities Platform strangely enough) and how it can save you a whole lot of time when you’re trying to find ‘that photo of your friend at that party’ or in my case, the photos I took of all my darkroom equipment that I want to sell on eBay as I haven’t processed my own 35mm films since the dawn of the Digital Photography age…
I think it’s going to take me a while…
I’m also going to clean up my inbox and be super ruthless with the ‘unsubscribe’ button on many of the marketing emails I get from websites I used to visit or had to sign up to in order to purchase something from them. I have over 6000 unread emails in my personal email inbox nearly all of which are of no interest to me at all! Again, taking up valuable digital space on my PC and all other devices I use to read my email on, as well as distracting me from emails and messages that are more important and relevant. Yes I shop in many online stores etc but do I really need to get a daily email from them with their latest offers? If I really need something I’ll take a look at their website…
Clearing out and organising my Digital Self isn’t going to be quick or easy but it’s something that has to be done and this is the year I’m going to do it!
Are you with me? 
A self confessed Geek and a HUGE James Bond fan, Lisa is the Online Community Manager for the IET's Engineering Communities online community platform. In her spare time she can usually be found sitting in her attic laughing at photos of her 'younger self' and wondering if she really does still need that Breville 'Pie Magic' machine …
