E-Hoarding: Another Form of Clutter That Can Cost You

If you’re like most professionals today you have too much of everything except TIME. One of the heaviest loads to bear these days is e-mail. But even after getting too much to begin with, I find there are groups out there who are self-proclaimed “knowledge junkies” or “e-hoarders,” which is so interesting to me. Since when is more the solution to having too much?

I’ve recently read several articles about the pros and cons of hoarding information and e-mail. First of all, is there really a “pro” side to that? According to a few people’s comments on the subject – yes… surprisingly enough… But of course, I disagree. (No surprise there.)

Are the folks who delight in e-hoarding (minus the true spam) the ones who are afraid they’ll miss out on important breaking news or the latest discoveries? Or do they fear they’ll never find the information again, even though we have more access to information today than ever before in history? Or will they run out of ideas if they don’t collect as much as humanly and electronically possible?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that they don’t worry about space for all this e-hoarding because for them, space is not an issue. However, there are other potential pitfalls that can cost you such as…

• Decision-making avoidance
• Wasted time looking for things because the more you keep, the more you have to manage and sift through
• Confusion or overwhelm due to volume
• Lack of focus and being easily distracted
• Time spent (wasted?) on collecting and fancy filing rather than doing and achieving
• Lost opportunities from not appreciating, using or acting on what’s been saved

E-hoarders continue to collect, even though they may not even be able to read everything and still… they never turn the faucet off. How they have enough time to read, sort and process all this information, I don’t know. And how can they actually put it all to good use? I don’t know the answer to that one either.

Well, this I know: I’m here to assist you if you find yourself stuck in e-mail overload and never really wanted to keep that much! You may have suddenly realized you’re in too deep and see that it’s time to make a change. If that’s the case, I’m here to help if you’re most interested in…

• Keeping only what’s useful to you, both now and in the foreseeable future
• Processing your e-mail out of the Inbox so you can clearly separate the useful information and actionable tasks from the junk.
• Knowing that all reference information you need is exactly where it needs to be: organized and categorized in certain places such as an e-file system, in e-mail folders, in Contacts, on the Calendar, on an electronic Task list, etc…
• Freeing up time and space and using each on opportunities, projects and creating progress.
• Being less frustrated, overwhelmed or stressed out by all the information swirling around.
• And managing less and searching less and achieving more and living more.

Keep in mind, I’m not an advocate of deleting every e-mail. I never have been. A lot of my clients have to keep a lot (or all!) of their e-mail for a lot of reasons – mostly legal – and I understand that.

But my concern is for the professionals out there who have no obligation to keep all the information they keep, but are spending time organizing it in e-mail folders because they don’t know what else to do with it.

Another concern is for those who are keeping the flood gates open to even more information than they can ever possibly need, read or use.

And finally, there are a lot of professionals out there just passively leaving everything in the Inbox and that’s not where it belongs. The Inbox is an INbox. It’s not a file cabinet, address book or to-do list.
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