Information Expiration Date

• Take a look at all the photos you have. Start with the photos about yourself and your family. These are the most important photos of all. they are valid forever because you want to have some memories of you when you are something like 70 years old.
• On the other hand you can have photos about pretty people you would like to meet for example. The only problem is that time goes by really fast and those people will change really fast too. In just five years all the people you ever met will have completely different faces and the photos you own are no longer valid.
• Take a look at news. How long are they valid? Less than a day. Sometimes just a few hours, sometimes even just a few minutes if you talk about Stock Exchange news. This kind of information is very short term information that is not even worth to save it for later. Just think about having all the exchange stock news and logs on your email reachable instantly. Cool you might say. But what for!?
• Music is another type of information in most cases valid forever. Information can be in the form of sound, images or text or even touch (maybe on day we will have digital touch) and music lasts forever, it is never out of date. However a speech or a football game report might be valid only for just a few minutes or one hour at best.

It’s very important you to distinguish between important from not important but most of all how long that information will need to be with you before you get rid of it.

Only then you can deal with information overload.

Think about this, you can have an entire book in your email, but you will need to access only one page of the book and only for one month which is the time it will take you to finish your job.

After that you can delete that email with no major consequences for you.

The only thing you will miss is a record of what you have done this summer.

I do not know about you, but I wish I had all my old information in an email account just used for achieving so I would always have all my life accessible to me.

You can do the same instead of hitting the delete button.