There is a sign in the break room—“Your mother does not work here. Clean up after yourself.” This chunk of wisdom can be applied not only to the communal microwave, but also to your inbox. We all know it– file cleanup can be tedious, but it’s important. Cleaning up the proliferation of electronic records and data that you collect is important for numerous reasons, but here are three to get you started:

1. You really can’t manage it anyway.

We had a client once with an executive who fought tooth and nail to keep every single e-mail he ever received or saved on the server. It was an ugly fight with his IT department that he eventually won. At the end of the day, he had so much e-mail that he could never find what he needed anyway. The old directive was to keep every e-mail just in case of litigation. The new approach says that it may actually be in your best interest to toss those things you do not need. Treat your inbox like your snail mail (paper or postal mail): take action or throw away. Better yet, develop protocols on what should be kept or tossed. Remember that destroying emails in accordance with a Companies retention policy could mean avoiding liability and future lawsuits.

2. File Cleanup is expensive.

Prevention is the best medicine, and the cheapest by far. Data storage is no longer an inexpensive solution and so at some point, you will be forced to do a purge. The reality is, the bigger that pile of data gets, the more effort and money are required to organize and streamline it. Procrastination adds cost.

3. IT can’t do it all.

IT folks report that the back-end data management problem is in many ways worse than the end-user management problem. This is because the data that IT manages isn’t owned by IT. Each department or owner wants, and needs, to weigh in on questions about keeping, purging or storing, but getting all those owners to wade through data is labor intensive and expensive.

In the end, we will all be forced to look at a program to better manage our data and knowledge, and to avoid letting file cleanup snowball into an unmanageable task. By attacking the program sooner rather than later, you will save time, money and aggravation.

Image by: kritiya at Depositphotos.com