The first thing you learn in the publishing business is how NOT to shuffle paper. Putting that paper in piles leads to huge piles at the end of each day, and still more to face the next day. So the rule becomes, you touch it – you do something with it (that doesn’t include moving it to another pile).

Unfortunately in this digital age, paper shuffling is way too easy. You can’t SEE the piles, so you think “out of sight, out of mind,” right? But they’re there, just the same… weighing you down somewhere, whether it’s the extra gig of space on your desktop or that constant nagging feeling that there’s unfinished business lurking behind backlit blue folders…

Recognizing a need for an overhaul before me and my overworked laptop were buried under an avalanche of keystrokes, I took a “blog break” over the holidays to try and discover a solution to my own digital paper shuffling. The solution, it turns out, isn’t that different from the golden rules of publishing: I open it, I need to do something with it; it doesn’t get to live on the desktop indefinitely.

Starting with email, I went through every file and vigorously cleaned out sent folders, inboxes, and all those “maybe I’ll read this some day” or “this might be a fun idea for an article” e’s that had been stacking up. If I had no plans to act on it in the next two months, I hit “delete” and tried not to cringe.

Then I told myself I needed to pick just seven e-newsletters to read (out of the 5o or so that land on my digital desk each week)  and made a new rule: if I wasn’t going to read them when I opened them, they needed to go straight to the trash. All the rest got a “Junk” label so I would stop looking at what I knew I was never actually going to read.

Next came social media: This one’s a bit tougher, especially for someone in marketing who preaches on the benefits of social media. How much IS too much? Recognizing I don’t spend much time on Twitter (the time I do spend there isn’t typically productive though it IS for some clients), I linked my Facebook account to my Twitter instead, killing two birds with one stone. Linked In still gets its own attention once a week, and this blog links to all my social media accounts – check it off! A few other random SM sites I’ve let lounge in a bookmarks folder – recognizing they’re viable but I don’t have the practical time to visit them on a regular basis. They’ve become “dessert” — something to munch on over a weekend movie…

RSS feeds: I didn’t realize I had so many! I cut it down to the 10 I actually do check in with and deleted the rest from my bookmarks. They weren’t getting my full attention, anyway…

Personal Emails and jokes: We all love ‘em, right? I’d hang onto the LOL ones, thinking I’d like to revisit them some day lest I forget the punchlines. Then I realized — If I’m going to forget the punchlines I’m just as likely to forget where I filed them. The new rule of thumb is — if it’s funny enough to share, I send it on to a friend or two to enjoy the laugh, then I kill it — no exceptions.

Sounds simple, right? But all these little measures added up (to nearly a gig of HD space, I kid you not). But more important, I freed up brain space. Now when I visit Facebook, I don’t feel guilty spending an extra 10 minutes catching up with friends, knowing I’ve streamlined. I can read an e-news brief in peace, knowing there aren’t 37 more stacked up behind it. The mailbox is clean — and when I do need to find something, I’m not wading through 3,000 messages to put my hands on it.

Give it a try – one little push can knock down a whole lot of dominoes!