When you think of hoarding, you might be picturing bags of junk, or an attic piled high with moth-eaten sweaters. Think again: stockpiling unneeded items has gone digital. Instead of a moldy old attic, we now have laptops brimming with useless files and neglected cloud storage that, for some reason, we can’t bring ourselves to clean up. 

This is digital hoarding. It’s a close cousin of physical hoarding, and it has a huge impact on our anxiety levels and productivity. It’s also easier to hide than physical hoarding, meaning that many of us are in denial we’re even doing it. 

Here’s how to know if you’re a digital hoarder — plus our step-by-step guide to decluttering your digital spaces, from your inbox to your desktop. Let’s dive in…

What is Digital Hoarding?

Having a high volume of digital content doesn’t necessarily make you a hoarder. But if your laptop storage is always in the red, your inbox is overflowing, and you’re constantly running out of space on Google Drive, then you might be slipping into digital hoarding habits. 

Ask yourself these questions to find out: 

1. Does the thought of deleting files make you nervous or anxious, even if they’re years old or possibly even duplicates?
2. Do you frequently upload and back up documents “just in case” they’re useful someday, then never refer to them again?
3. Did you once have a system of organizing your files but you gave up on it because you “don’t have time” to maintain it?
4. Have you considered reorganizing your folders, even deleting some of them, but you keep postponing it because the task seems overwhelming?
5. Do you often get a “Storage Full” alert from your laptop, or notifications that you need to upgrade your Dropbox or Drive…but you only ever delete the absolute bare-minimum of files, to make the messages go away?

If you mostly answered “yes,” no judgment — we’ve been there. But it is possible to consciously uncouple from your hoarding habits, and reap the benefits of a more orderly online life. First, let’s dig into why so many of us started digital hoarding.  

Why We Hoard

When the era of cheap content storage arrived, it made our lives easier — but it also ushered in digital hoarding. 

Cloud storage services like Dropbox, Apple Cloud, and Google Drive gained momentum in the 2010s, and they brought an end to the days of cramming files onto a portable USB stick. It felt like liberation! Instead of making tough decisions about the files we had room to keep, we could take thousands of photos, create endless documents, and then back them all up. 

At the same time, we were living more of our lives online. We accumulated more digital documents, music files, videos, and images than ever before. In 2020, researchers estimated that 1.7MB of data was created every second for every person on the planet. No wonder we didn’t have time to keep track of it all. Meanwhile, cheap storage ensured we never had to — we could delay decision-making about the fate of our files because there seemed to be no limit to the amount we could store. 

The Hoarding Point of No Return

So what’s the downside? Laptops have more storage than ever. Cloud storage helps you access files from anywhere and syncs them across your devices. Options like Dropbox and Drive are free up to a certain threshold, with additional storage subscriptions that cost the equivalent of a couple coffees per month. 

The problem is that we stopped being discerning about what to keep. For most of us, our cloud storage isn’t a glorious library of useful information — it contains folder upon folder of outdated or duplicate content, all of it acquired in an unstructured, haphazard way. 

Our reluctance to delete anything has bled into every part of our digital lives. We let our inboxes fill with thousands of unread messages, and we have dozens of browser tabs that we’re too scared to close — cue constant distractions and feelings of failure. In short, we stopped controlling the content and it started controlling us.  

Hoarder, We Have a Problem 

Our hoards of digital content have significant practical downsides, like the time you lose when navigating unruly folders, the dollar cost of unneeded storage, and lower device performance. There can be legal risks, too: if you have content from previous employers backed up, or work files lurking on your private laptop, you risk compromising sensitive data.

Hoarding also impacts your mental health and emotional regulation. Studies link digital hoarding to anxiety and stress; you might feel guilty or uneasy, knowing just how much outdated information you have stored away. Scientists have observed that when people get attached to valueless digital content (like memes, screenshots, or multiple photos of their brunch), this breeds even greater disorganization and loss of perspective. Some of us feel so overwhelmed by our bulging online archives that we pretend they don’t exist. To psychologists, this is the point where digital hoarding can tip over into a damaging cycle of task avoidance. The bottom line: digital hoarders suffer from information overload, which leads to higher stress levels and impaired performance.

But how do you even begin to tackle digital hoarding behaviors, which can besiege everything from your browser tabs and bookmarks to your unruly inbox? Let’s break it down into baby steps, so you can wipe your digital slate clean.  

5 Steps to Reclaiming Your Digital Sanity 

1. Spring clean your laptop

Disorganized folders aren’t just distracting and time-wasting, they impair your laptop’s performance — which drags your productivity down, too. To declutter your laptop, start by uninstalling unused applications then remove the temporary files (with Disk Cleanup or an app like CleanMyMac X). Head over to your Downloads folder and Desktop, and define a cutoff date — perhaps two months ago — and delete everything older than that date. Free up even more space by using a tool like Duplicate File Finder to identify and delete dupes. Empty your Trash, and bask in your now fast-running laptop. 

2. Reorganize your cloud storage the easy way

First, let’s get you out of the red. See how much storage you’re using by going to “Storage”  in Google Drive or in Dropbox click on your avatar then “Manage account.” Next, sort files by size to quickly identify large ones you can remove, then sort them by “last modified” to identify content you haven’t touched for months (or years). Do this until you’ve freed up a minimum of 25% of your available storage, ideally 50%. And don’t forget to remove yourself from folders you no longer need access to, like the ones belonging to former employers or clients.  

Here’s the counterintuitive part: don’t try to organize all the content you have left. Spending time sifting through it all will catapult you right back to a state of overwhelm. Instead, put all your remaining content into a folder called “Backlog” or “Slushpile,” and create new folders for your current projects. Voilà: your distracting archive is out of sight, out of mind, and you have a newly minimalist filing system.

3. Give your inbox a fresh start with SaneBox

Your inbox is another place where digital hoarding can play havoc with your productivity. People typically keep around 50% of the emails they receive but they only reply to about a third of them. And when thousands of emails pile up, they distract you from the most important conversations. 

Very few people actively address their avalanche of emails, and it’s no wonder — who has time to manually unsubscribe from dozens of newsletters and unwanted senders? Fortunately, SaneBox can take the heavy lifting out of it. With Email Deep Clean, you can quickly analyze your inbox to find high-volume senders and old emails that are taking up space, and then consign them to your Trash folder. And you can maintain your tidy inbox by banishing annoying senders, snoozing unimportant emails, and setting follow-up reminders to ensure you don’t miss a beat.  

4. Declutter your online experience with Shift

After tackling your laptop, cloud storage, and inbox, the trick is maintaining your newly organized state. If you’re prone to unfocused multitasking and switching between endless tabs, it’s all too easy to get distracted and backslide into bad habits. The friction involved in logging in and out of multiple apps, and keeping track of all your tabs, bookmarks, and inboxes, heightens the very anxiety that causes digital hoarding. 

A tool like Shift can help restore your focus: it’s the only browser that removes distractions by integrating all your web apps, accounts, and tabs into one single window. Merging your apps into Shift eliminates searching, switching, and logging into accounts, making your browsing more efficient. Add extensions like Dropbox, seamlessly integrate your Google Drive, browse faster, and avoid tabs piling up. Tidy desktop, tidy mind.