One of my favorite technology speakers/writers is Dr. Bob Spencer. He recently blogged about e-hoarding. I would like to share some of his thoughts with you. He wrote:

There are a ton of shows on TV about hoarders --those poor people keep everything! Well the traumatic condition called e-hoarding is finally coming out of the closet. Many suffer from document hoarding. In other words, we keep stuff forever - longer if we can. Why? Because! E-hoarding is what happens when we go paperless and more and more of our data is stored electronically.  

IBM found that one in three business leaders frequently make decisions based on information they either don't have or don't really trust. Shockingly, one in two business leaders admit that they don't have working access to the information they need to do their jobs. Business leaders and knowledge workers usually know they have the data they need somewhere, but they can't put their finger on it. They don't know how to find it, and if they do find it, they're not sure how current or accurate it is. Not following a records retention policy for the destruction of expired files could lead to legal problems in the event of litigation and e-discovery. E-hoarding leads to the retention of vast amounts of electronic documents and the potential of retrieving an incorrect version for decision making - the outcome of which is a bad decision. With computers sold with higher capacity hard drives, e-hoarding doesn't stress storage the way it would have in the past. And why delete, when it may well be cheaper to store? The productivity lost while purging old files may well cost your organization more than the bloated storage costs. That is, until it comes time to find something. Powerful search engines like Google create the illusion that information is always at our fingertips. This is however, just an illusion. If you are not sure if you are an e-hoarder or not, Network World has compiled 10 signs you're an e-hoarder. 

10 signs you are an e-hoarder by Jeff Vance Network World, February 28, 2012:

1. You can't locate the delete key on your keyboard
2. You save every single version and variation of any document you ever create because you never know when that one turn of phrase or clever analogy you cut out might be useful somewhere else.
3. You rarely sort items out of your inbox into folders.
4. You use your inbox as a defacto address book.
5. You regularly sign up for e-newsletters but never unsubscribe from ones you don't read.
6. You spend more time hunting for important documents and files than actually working on them.
7. Your desktop is cluttered with enough icons to wallpaper your office.
8. When you do delete a document, you feel a sense of foreboding and suspect that you may have made a terrible mistake.
9. You have more thumb drives than you can keep track of, many of which are pretty much duplicates of each other.
10. Remember those old CD-ROMs you use to back up your data to? You still have them. Worse, you even have floppy disks, although you have no vintage computers that could even read them.

Even after reviewing these signs and deciding you are just fine - you could still be an e-hoarder. If your e-mail inbox has 10,000 messages (or even a thousand) you are most likely an e-hoarder. If your local hard drive has a copy of every document on your server - or every document you have EVER created, you are an e-hoarder. If you sent your client last year's financial statement by accident, you are probably an e-hoarder. Cleaning up old documents, either by archiving or deleting, reduces error, increases system performance, and improves efficiency. Yes, it does take time, but, there are financial rewards to keeping your files in good order and limiting the number of documents you work with.