What happens to all of the stuff we create?
As writers, business owners, and creatives?
This is a question that pops into my mind every year around this time.
If you’ve been creating on the web for any number of years, you’ve likely accumulated a lot of “stuff”.
From accounts on various platforms, blog posts, websites, photos, podcasts, and videos.
This stuff all lives online indefinitely unless you do something to it.
Dealing with Our Digital Content
The way I see it, there are 3 possible ways to deal with all of this output:
- Keep it as is
- Maintain and update it
- Sunset or delete it
1. Keep It As Is
For many of us, keeping our content as is, is the default and easiest approach.
We’re often putting something out there and then moving on to creating the next thing.
Could be a quick social post, a longer written piece, or a video that serves at the moment.
As I’ve accumulated so much content over the past 25 years of my digital life, this approach is coming back to haunt me.
The amount of content I oversee has only accelerated as I’ve built my business.
When you have other people creating content, coding, or contributing it’s amazing. But it’s more stuff to manage long-term, too.
Most of the time, at least in a business context, we need to maintain and update things.
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2. Maintain and Update It
This is how we’ve approached software development at AccessAlly.
It makes sense to continue to improve, adapt, and expand on the software we’ve already built.
As more people use it, we get feedback and ideas and we keep making upgrades.
In a way, our software is a living thing that keeps growing and evolving, along with the people who use it.
The same goes for our documentation and the workshops we run to educate people about new features and improvements.
But we haven’t taken the same approach with our blog posts.
We just focused on publishing the next article.
However, things are always evolving and blog posts can and do get stale, too. So we’re going back and refreshing older stuff now that we know more.
Then I recently moved over 200 podcast episodes to Substack. It was a smooth process, but there was still a lot of content to forward, update, and delete from the old location.
Just like the more physical things you own, the more work it is to manage, organize, and clean them…
The more content you create, the more work it is to manage, organize, and keep it relevant.
3. Sunset or Delete It
Deleting things that you’ve created might feel like a waste of your past efforts.
I felt this way too, when I deleted old blog posts that were no longer providing value. But pruning the content that no longer reflects your best work is important.
In our software, we’ve sunset a few features that were no longer possible to maintain due to integration issues with other companies.
But for the most part, our software continues to evolve and we haven’t had to remove functionality very often.
There is another benefit to deleting things: it reduces the amount of server space required to store it all.
Now you might be thinking, well everything is in the cloud, it doesn’t matter how many video files I have… but the truth is that there exists a physical server (or many!) out there keeping all of these files for you in the cloud.
And these data centers use up a lot of energy, water, and space. So not only is it better for your mental load to have less digital stuff to manage, but it’s also better for the environment. At least, on the aggregate level.
Here are some places you might need to declutter digitally:
- Social media accounts: when you decide to leave or close down a brand presence.
- Internal wiki documentation: we try to do an annual clean-up to make sure things are up to date and still useful and accurate.
- Blog posts: I recently learned from an SEO specialist that all blog content should be refreshed and updated yearly, yikes!
- Online course and membership site content: think old courses you’ve retired and call recordings that are no longer useful.
- Podcasts and YouTube videos: updating descriptions, or choosing to delete ones that are no longer showing the best you can do.
- Email automation campaigns: making sure that automated emails people get are still relevant and up to date is huge and should be reviewed annually.
- Photos: you may have noticed that online photo storage places love it when you take dozens of photos because they’ll just keep charging you to store them. I like to delete duplicates as soon as I can because there’s no point storing blurry photos or those that aren’t “just right” for the rest of my life.
- Emails: if your email inbox is stuffed to the brim and you keep everything… you might want to set up some filters and even delete older emails. Gasp, I know!
- Accounts for stuff you don’t use anymore: I use 1Password to keep track of all my logins, and there are thousands of places where I’ve created an account… some are trials for software or platforms I never got into. It’s nice to close these down and it reduces the potential for getting hacked through accounts you don’t log into often.
- Graphics, documents, downloads: you might have PDF guides people can download from your website that need a refresh, or graphics that have become dated or no longer apply.
Don’t Create It In The First Place
You might be a little overwhelmed by a list like this. The point isn’t to set aside your already full life and dedicate yourself to digital decluttering.
Instead, just shift your mindset ever so slightly to ask yourself:
- Do I need a blog post for this? Can I commit to making this piece of content and maintaining it for the next 5-10 years?
- Do I need 23 versions of this selfie? Once I’ve picked out the one I like, can I delete the others?
- Should I archive that old project, that old business website, or an old account?
- Can I take 5 minutes right now to update an internal process for how we do one thing in our company?
Oh and if it wasn’t obvious, I’m writing this as much for me as I am for you.
My team and I have created hundreds of YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts, knowledge-base articles, and social media posts.
Not to mention the millions of lines of code written and shipped for our software.
Creative Long-Term Thinking
Thinking about the lifetime of the things we create is wise.
It helps us focus on creating the things that matter most.
And let go of those that no longer serve us or our people.
Have you sunset any projects, content, or other creations? I’d love to know how you manage all of the stuff you create over time!
