The light at the end of your information pipeline

I've been an information packrat for a long, long time. I got this way trying to make sure I overlooked important information, and it's turned into an endless maze of paperwork, files, and emails that I'll probably never actually need. It's unfortunate, but I'm learning a lot in the process of evaluating what's necessary and what isn't, and I've decided to share with you some of the more important things I've discovered.

For the most part, keeping documentation generally fits into two categories: financial papers, and anything electronic. I'll deal with these separately.

When dealing with money:

1. Paper trails won't save your ass. I used to maintain six or seven years of bank statements just in case I needed something out of it. I've had to deal wtih a few hairy financial situations since then, and my hard copies have never helped—in almost all cases, you've got one entity (a bank or, say, an employer) to back you up even though something is disputed by someone else (a credit card or telephone company).
   
2. Keep documents for any transactions performed on your own. When you don't have anyone to back you up, you do need to keep the paperwork. Any time you pay cash for something or you have to make a deal where there isn't a logged transaction, it's vitally important to keep a record for this for as long as you'll need it. This includes ATM transactions, too.
   
3. Keep anything needed for your taxes for at least three years. There's no way around this one, sorry.
   
4. If you're purging your files, shred everything. This should be a no-brainer, but when you're throwing out huge quantities of paperwork, it's probably pretty important that everything gets chopped up. You'd be surprised how much you can find out about someone with a half-inch stack of discarded papers. Maybe you won't be surprised. I don't know, really.
   

When dealing with email and files:

1. Almost everything has a lifetime of "this week," "six months," or "forever." Very few things fall between.
   
2. Pipeline your email. I can't stress this more. I've got a search folder in Outlook that brings up all my email that's older than six months. Once a week I pull the folder up and resend anything I think I may need in the next six months. Anything else gets deleted immediately. My inbox has stayed at a fairly stable 400MB—and I'm on a lot of high-traffic lists.
   
3. Put dates on your files. Any time I start a project, it gets a new directory with an eight-digit date (20060518 for today) generally signifying the start of the project. These get nuked in the same process where I clean out my email.
   
4. If you didn't create it, remember that you can always find it again. At least, that's mostly how it works on the internet. Save for original files that you may have stashed someplace, odds are good that the funny commercial of the talking cats you found six years ago will still be around the net for the next decade. Let it go.
   

I've actually got a lot to say about this, but I'm intentionally keeping it short so it's easily digestable. I think it's vitally important that we go through our lives and discard (or recycle, kids) the things that we don't actively need anymore. The process of cleaning things out refreshes us about what was important months or years ago, and gives us more brainspace for finding new things to store away for the next decade.