The Joy of Auto-Deletion

One of the best things I ever did was setting my computer up to delete my files by default. Now, that might sound crazy to you, anathema to the very notion of good computing. But, let me tell you brothers and sisters, it saved my digital soul!

You see, fundamentally, I'm a messy and impatient person when it comes to my digital lifestyle. I can't be bothered labeling all of my files carefully. I can't be bothered maintaining a taxonomically perfect filing system. I download or create hundreds of files every day, and the 10seconds it would take to file each of them would add up to too much.

So, inevitably, the clutter on my hard drive would mount. My desktop was drowning in a million icons (far worse than the picture above, actually), and the state of my other folders wasn't much better. I just couldn't bring myself to knuckle down and tidy it all up and DELETE ALL OF THE CRAP, because I knew that once I started it would take days to achieve complete cleanliness. Yes, I was lost. Dark days, dark days.

But then it hit me! The whole system was back to front. Generally, computers keep every file by default, and the user has to actively choose what to delete. Now, that would be efficient if the things worth keeping outnumbered the junk. But that's not how it is any more. Not for me at least. 90% of the files that I create on my hard drive are useless within a few days. Precious files are quite rare. Thus it would be more efficient for my files to be deleted by default, and persist only if I went out of my way to designate them worthy. Clearly, I needed to set up auto-deletion.

So that's just what I did. I found a piece of Mac software called Hazel that seemed perfect for this job. Hazel is an application that runs in the background, watching any folder or folders that you ask it to. You can then assign actions for Hazel to perform on that folder. For example, Hazel can automatically move mp3 files to a 'music' folder, set the label on any new files to green, or delete files that have not been touched in the past month. You define the rules.

Using Hazel, I implemented a very simple auto-deletion system. I created a folder on my desktop called "temp", and I set Hazel to delete any "temp" file that has "not been added in the past 30 days". I then made "temp" my default save location for everything. Every download, every text file, every screenshot now goes to "temp" by default. And if I haven't filed it elsewhere in 30 days...poof...it's gone. In other words, my Mac presumes files to be junk (which they usually are) unless I specify otherwise.



This system seems much more human friendly to me. In someways, it resembles the way our brain does file storage. By default, information that we are exposed to is forgotten half a minute after exposure (mostly). If we need to remember something in any detail we have to put in effort and think about that information, or even right it down. And thank goodness for that. If we remembered every detail about our day (every word of every conversation, every license plate number, every frozen orange), we'd go crazy pretty quickly. And for the brain, that system works brilliantly. Because we don't expect our memory to store absolutely everything in detail, we know we have to put in effort when there's important information that needs to be remembered.

I find that my auto-deletion system has a similar effect. If I start an important document, I know that I have to put in the effort to file it away in a permanent folder. If I don't, it will be gone in a month. It's very motivating. And I haven't lost one important file yet. Most importantly, however, my hard drive is cleaner than it's ever been, without me hardly ever having to clean it up. I'm saved!

(Ethan over at Kinkless.com has detailed instructions for setting up a more complex Hazel based filing system, complete with some really cool demo videos)