A thing that I always promise myself that I’ll do during the holiday break is “tidy up.” Not in terms of the house, because I do that on a regular basis anyway — I get amusingly upset if the kitchen or living room in particular are left in too much of a state for too long; it’s amusing to me, at least, albeit in retrospect — but tidy up my workspace and my laptop, which by the end of each year tends to be crying out in desperation for attention and a little care.
The problem isn’t that I use it basically every day for hours on end; that’s what laptops are kind of meant for, after all, and I’m happy to report that Apple hasn’t let me down on that front yet. No, the problem is that I don’t empty my digital trash can. This is, in part, by design — more than once in my life, I’ve accidentally deleted a file that I wasn’t actually finished with because I like to try to free up my desktop at the end of each day, and sometimes get a little overzealous in doing so, only to then empty trash and discover the next morning that I’ve deleted something I was 90% done with and needed to complete in the shortest possible time that day. (Yes, I’ve done this more than once. You don’t need to judge me that harshly.)
My solution, I decided the last time I found myself gesturing silently in frustration to the heavens, wasn’t to simply be more careful in what I put into the trash bin. Instead, I decided, what I really needed to do was not empty trash until I could feel confident that I didn’t need anything in there. In theory, this means that I’d check the bin at the end of a week, say, and then empty it after saving anything that had been placed there by accident.
Note that I said, “in theory.” In practice, I went through my trash bin the Monday between Christmas and New Year and realized with no small amount of horror that I hadn’t actually emptied my digital trash since June. The past six-and-a-bit-months of my digital life were remaindered there, from old work stories and images to PDF review copies of things, screenshots of any number of random things I’d sent to friends or family and hundreds of other files. I’m being literal when I say that; there were more than a thousand files in the trash, waiting patiently for me to do something, anything, with them.
When I hit “empty trash,” you could almost hear my laptop breathe a sigh of relief; the available space on my machine went from something like 8GB to 131GB immediately. Maybe I need to get a little better about paying attention to this stuff in the future.