I have a talk where I encourage everyone to be clear on the data they collect and keep. I encourage people to automate deletion so they don’t have to do anything extra. In the original incarnation of the talk, I said that everyone should apply konmari principles to the data they keep, only instead of “sparking joy”, data we keep has to have a clear and immediate purpose. It has to spark respect and utility.

I like konmari for the idea of grouping all of a similar type of thing together and then sorting them together. I, er, don’t usually attribute emotions to my socks. I think it’s a little difficult to sort data based on the emotions it gives you. Data at the scale most organizations are working at is less in the range of “books you own” and more in the range of “bacteria in your body”.

When I was looking for another analogy, I thought back to my time on the Microsoft BitLocker team. I was with them as a writer for that first year, when we were still explaining the value proposition over and over again. The laptop, we would explain, was an easy loss to write off, as long as the data on it was secured. A couple thousand dollars worth of laptop left in the back of a taxi was so trivial compared to the cost of a data exposure or breach. It was difficult to change our paradigm at the time to “trust the cloud”, but that’s where we were headed. The data was on a corporate network, or a backup, or in the rudimentary beginnings of the cloud. It was ok if we never got that laptop back. We all had to change how we thought about losing things versus losing access versus losing data.

Here are some instructions for deleting your personal data, as inspired by one of my favorite poems.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Delete reminder emails, meeting notices, any ephemeral message about an event that has passed.
Delete pictures if they’re not labeled, anything of people you don’t know or care about.
Delete the easy levels, the games you don’t play, the spreadsheets for projects that are long past.

The hour badly spent is hard to delete, you’ve already done it. Nevertheless,
delete games you don’t enjoy playing.
Clear your media feeds and timelines of people who don’t feed your soul.
Dig down and delete those emailed fights with your ex, or your current. That was then; this is now.

The opposition to this line is “Hold fast to dreams/for if dreams die/life is a broken-winged bird/that cannot fly”
Delete who it was you meant to be, all the things that make you feel guilty.
Purge the Pinterest for a wedding you did another way
Dump fitness apps that you just wince at, delete false starts and walk away.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

What are you leaving for your heirs?
When we come to clean out your house, will there be boxes of clippings?
Clean and organize your bookmarks, toss all the pointers to dead sites
Ruthlessly rid yourself of mediocre selfies and unlabeled group photos and clutter.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

You will lose some things you meant to keep. That is the nature of things.
You will regret some deletions, and you will worry a bit.
I’m sorry, but life is full of loss, and paper fails and disks fail and the memory of humankind is frail.
It won’t be a disaster.

Practice losing, practice letting go, practice only saving things for a year, or two, or ten.

The art of losing, of forgetting, is built into us, the entropy that causes things to fall apart. Fighting our nature is sometimes noble, but less than we hope. it’s sometimes useless, but less than we think.

Nothing I write will be relevant in 5 years, 10 at best. That’s always been true. Technical writing is like that, and I have to accept that I’m etching server instructions in the sand at low tide, or lose my heart when the waves come in. Almost nothing you write, or save, or store, or archive will relevant for longer than that, either. Learn to let it go, and prepare your writing stick to scratch meaning in the beach at the next low tide.

Loss is not a disaster.