Imagine this: Every day, you get hundreds letters at home. A lot of these letters are just stuff that you don't care about, they are ads, or information you should read once and be done with it. But you keep every single one in your office. Even the ones you're sure you'll never need again. Soon your office would be so full with letters that you couldn't enter it again. Ridiculous, right?

We don't do this with physical mail. Usually, we toss stuff in the recycling bin because who wants a house full of junk mail and old newspapers? We don't hang onto every sticky note or scrap of paper we've ever touched. We recycle them.

But when it comes to digital stuff, it's a different story. I remember when Gmail first came out? It was a bit of a revolution: you had enough space so you didn't have to delete emails. You could just archive them.

Thanks to their awesome search feature, you could find anything later. So we stopped asking ourselves if we really needed to keep something. We thought,

"Hey, there's unlimited space in the cloud. "

But that unlimited space is actually on some server somewhere—not in your home, but it's still taking up real space.

Do we need to keep every email? Every photo? Every note we've ever taken? Fuck no! Keeping only what’s necessary—not just for legal reasons but because it's genuinely useful—means using less digital space (1).

Action Question

What's one domain where you could start deleting digital clutter instead of archiving it? (2)

Footnotes

(1)That can save you money on cloud subscriptions and help the planet by reducing disk usage. I'm trying to apply this myself.

(2) For me, I'm starting with my digital notes, deleting ones I don’t use anymore. Next up: photos.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Written with AI help
This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.