Digital Declutter December!

With most UBC faculty and staff having moved to remote working and teaching in 2020, the volume of files being created, copied and updated, and email moving back-and-forth has increased exponentially. While we may be aware that our digital files and emails desperately need to be sorted through and cleaned up, perhaps the thought of tackling such tasks feels overwhelming.

Barbara Towell, Electronic Records Manager, University Archives provides us with some tips for managing your e-mail. The first step includes clearing out your junk mail folder. Start by mass deleting (or archiving) any messages you are certain that you don’t need, like notifications and reminders for past events, confirmations on sent items and newsletters you have already read. The second step consists of creating Folders and Labels to organize the messages you want to keep. After taking the time to perform this initial clean-up, Barbara Towell recommends emptying the trash regularly and “making it part of a daily routine. Even the last ten minutes of the day can really make a big difference” to ensure your transitory records are properly deleted and your inbox remains manageable.

Staff and faculty will be happy to know that there are currently plans underway to assist individuals with the ongoing maintenance of transitory records in their email. The Email Retention Working Group is investigating tools to automate the cleanup of deleted items, draft messages and junk email. Once decided, the automation tool or tools will be recommended to UBC IT for implementation at a future date. For more information, please read the Digital Declutter article retrieved from Privacy @ UBC.

Happy Holidays from the David Lam library team!