A personal journey through 4GB of laptop clutter and over 800 phone screenshots I'll never look at again
The discovery
During some late-night reading, I stumbled across a 2025 paper by Liu & Liu in Frontiers in Psychology on something called digital hoarding.
I'd never heard the term before.
But as I kept reading, I felt Called out.
They defined it as: "The compulsive accumulation of digital files to the point of distress and disorganization."
And I thought to myself ,that's not only a research subject. that's my laptop,and probably my phone too.
On my laptop:
-
~/Downloads– 47 PDFs, 12 driver installers, 3 tutorials I never finished. Oldest: 2019 -
~/Desktop– Screenshots of error messages I Googled and fixed. Oldest: 2021 -
~/code/experiments– 23 half-built projects, 18 with broken dependencies. Oldest: 2020 -
~/Documents/old-work– Repos from two jobs ago. Two jobs ago! Oldest: 2018
On my phone:
- Screenshots folder – 1,112 images. Error messages, tweets, "read later" articles, memes.
- Photos (duplicates) – The same picture saved 3-4 times.
- Old app caches – 2.1 GB from apps I haven't opened in months.
- Voice notes – 47 recordings. "Reminder to self" from 2022 to 2026.
- WhatsApp images – From groups I left in 2023.
I was a digital hoarder with a terminal and a smartphone addiction.
What Liu & Liu taught me
The paper described digital hoarding as a "double-edged sword."
On one edge: It feels responsible. "I might need this someday." "Better to save it than lose it."
On the other edge: It's actively hurting me — on every device I own.
They listed consequences that hit too close to home:
- Cognitive load – Every extra file is a tiny decision I don't make
- Decision fatigue – Which of these 14 project folders is the real one?
- Anxiety – "What if I delete something important?"
- Battery drain – Your phone constantly indexing thousands of unused files
And the part that really got me: "A protective behavior that eventually becomes a burden."
The hidden cost never measured
Before cleanup:
- Storage used: 10 GB
- Boot time: 48 seconds
- Search time: 6-8 seconds
- Battery life: ~6 hours
- Backup time: 45 minutes
After deleting 500+ old files and 2,000+ screenshots:
- Storage used: 8 GB (down 2 GB)
- Boot time: 31 seconds (down 35%)
- Search time: 1-2 seconds (down 75%)
- Battery life: ~8 hours (up 33%)
- Backup time: 12 minutes (down 73%)
No hardware upgrade. No factory reset. Just… deleting things.
The developer-specific hoarding patterns
Liu & Liu didn't study developers specifically. But I noticed patterns unique to our craft — and how they spill onto our phones.
1: The tutorial graveyard
We start a tutorial. Clone the repo. Follow along for 30 minutes. Get distracted. Never finish.
But we keep the folder. Just in case.
My count: 23 unfinished tutorial projects. 18 using packages that are now deprecated.
2: The error screenshot museum
Something breaks. We screenshot the error on our laptop. Then we Google it. Fix it. Feel proud.
But we never delete some of the screenshots.
My count: 110 laptop screenshots + 1,110 phone screenshots. I will never look at 99% of them again.
3: I'll refactor this someday
Old projects. Old code. Old mistakes. We keep them like trophies.
My count: 4GB of code I haven't touched in over two years.
4: The screenshot spiral
See something interesting? Screenshot. Want to remember a tweet? Screenshot. Need to save a receipt? Screenshot.
Then never organize them. Never look at them. Never delete them.
My count: 1,112 screenshots. I remember taking maybe 200 of them.
5: The "I'll clean this later" cache (phone)
Apps cache images, videos, and files. We ignore it. It grows. We run out of storage.
My count: 2 GB of "System Data" — a black hole of forgotten files.
Liu & Liu ended their paper with a question:
"How do we design systems that support selective retention rather than indiscriminate accumulation?"
I don't have an answer. But for me,I'll start small. One old file. One screenshot. One deleted folder at a time.
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