You probably have a laptop or desktop computer loaded with files. Students usually hoard tons of videos, music, photos and of course, regular files such as Word documents, PDFs and presentations.

Here’s an experiment: Turn to a low-data lifestyle (LDL). Let’s try to pack our entire life in under 10GB.

4 Reasons to have a LDL

1. Performance Gain: It is a known fact that a hard drive with less data with run faster as it is less fragmented with data, and living life with as little electronic data as possible aids in having a better computing experience.

2. Portability: My ultimate goal is to take my data on the road and be independent of a computer. I want to be able to take my most important data on a thumb drive and walk over to another computer, and feel like I never left home.

3. Back Up Security: A smaller drive is easier to backup and it’s possible to maintain several backups in different forms with ease. I can move my most important data on to an external drive within an hour in case of an emergency. I can back up all my data online for very little money at low cost of bandwidth and time.

4. Focus on What’s Important: Eliminating the unnecessary is common productivity gospel to be spread far and wide. By cutting your files to the essentials, you’ll not only be free of a chaotic mess, but also value the things you have more.

Step One: Clean Up Your Harddrive

The initial step to take is to declare war upon the enormous amount of data that’s occupying your hard drive. For some, this task may be daunting, but it takes a few hours at most to do - in the worst case.

The goal in this step is to eliminate data you basically don’t know, or simply forgot about. It’s about finding old piles of junk and saying “Hey, I forgot I even had that”.

• Analyze Your Drive: Identifying Junk isn’t always easy on a hard drive, which is why I recommend using a utility such as Disk Utility X (Mac) or Sequoia View (Windows). These apps allow you to graphically see what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive. Identify the big chunks, and eliminate what you don’t need anymore. Often, this will be some old videos, or surprisingly huge project files. I once found an iMovie project that was 4GB in size that I had totally forgotten about and could safely discard.

• Uninstall old apps: Once in a while, you’ll find that you’ve installed a bunch of new apps that fill up your hard drive. More often than not I’ll have some old game or shareware app that I didn’t like, finished using or for which the trial expired. Time to to get rid of these. The easiest way to uninstall apps is to use the built-in Add-Remove Programs tool for Windows, to be found in the Control Panel. On a Mac, I suggest using AppZapper or the free alternative AppTrap that actually lives as a preference pane on your Mac. This ensures you remove any excess data on the Mac. While this whole step doesn’t directly help our cause, as you’ll see, it helps in keeping things tidy and under control.

Streamline Your Digital World (With Three Folders)

This is a key We need to rethink our digital lives, and the way we organize them. On a wild guess, how many folders on your computer contain any of your important data?

For most, it’s a lot. Their stuff is strewn all over the drive in vague places and the “My Documents” folder is just a huge mess, cluttered with folders you didn’t create yourself in the first place.

Here’s the thing.

You need to take control of your folder setup, as I’ve extensively covered in this article.

Pruning your life to just three or four folders gives you the freedom of mentally junking everything else. Leave it to the OS, and stop worrying about it. In case of fire, take these three folders and run.

Change The Way You Think About Data

The final step in order to pursue a low-data lifestyle is to change the way you handle data every day. Every file that isn’t half as important to you as the most important file isn’t worth the disk space.

Trash videos once you’ve seen them. Or archive them externally.

Cleanup your photos. Trash the blurries, the embarrassments, and duplicates. You don’t need 4 shots of yourself grinning in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Scan documents at the lowest quality necessary. You don’t need your tax report at a pristine 400dpi resolution. It’s a tax report.

It’s all about getting yourself to value the disk space, and instill an unconscious aversion to hoarding files.

I have more than 10GB of data

That’s bound to happen. Some people have extensive photo libraries, or videos, or huge iTunes collections. Still, the most important part of your life, the Reference folder, shouldn’t be much more than 10GB in the worst case. If so, you’re life is way too complex, or you’re scared of loosing data.

Just keep in mind: A secure backup system that works (meaning: check regularly whether it’s functional and easy to retrieve data) will help you stop worrying about data loss. I love my Time Machine feature in Mac OS X.

I’d like to hear from you: What kind of data do you hoard, and why? Am I the only one feeling this urge to keep my life portable enough to pack up and run within minutes?

There's More!

• Treating the Post-Exam Trauma
• Reverse Planning Your Way to 100% in Every Course
• 5 No-Excuse Reasons for Students to Become Early Risers
• Creating a Productive Folder Setup
• 10 Things Your Student Bag Should Never Be Missing