How much data do you need?

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Have you realized that you hold and you gather and you collect a lot of information, a lot of data, photos and whatever, but you find yourself not actually using that data.

So think about your photos in the iCloud and so on and so forth on your phone, on your computer.

Have you noticed when you take a photo, sometimes you’ll take one or two photos, but you’ll keep every single one.

It’s very rare.

I haven’t found that many people.

There are people that do it, but it’s very rare that I find people that actually delete those other photos and just keep the best one, they’ll keep everything.

Now, is that a problem locally?

I guess not, but I’ll come to that later on.

I was interviewed by a friend journalist of mine called Karina, and she was having, she wanted me to have a discussion with the director of the National Archives here in Holland, Morens.

And we wanted to talk about Tech Minimalism.

She only knew one person who was a Tech Minimalist.

And we were discussing what the National Archives should hold, how much information they should hold, what the tech stack should be effectively.

And Marenz already, I think, knew the answer to this.

And we were in agreement that throwing more tech into the situation wasn’t going to help.

We’ve got to change our way of thinking of how what to hold, not how to hold, but what to hold.

In the Dutch government and governments everywhere, there’s a lot of red tape and et cetera, et cetera, so it takes a lot longer to do this, but you and I can actually decide well, we don’t need five photos of the same thing, let’s just keep the best one.

When it comes to organizations and specifically governments, they need to hold it legally for five years or whatever it is, but how do they hold it?

and what should they hold for that long period of time?

So that article, I will link actually below.

It’s in Dutch.

My Dutch isn’t fantastic, but I kind of understand it, but obviously the interview was in English, so I was there, right?

Just us three.

But it got me thinking about how much data we use in our business.

We have a project management tool.

We have to-do lists. we have a CRM.

And the CRM is what I want to touch on.

I don’t famously use a CRM.

I need one, but I don’t famously, I say, because people say to me, why on the earth are you not using a CRM?

There are many reasons, and I’ll make another video about it.

But the point is the amount of data we put into our systems, into the CRM.

So, sorry about that.

That was crazy.

So the point is the amount of data we put in our CRMs, you’ll probably find that you just won’t use that amount of data, that all the data that you put into it.

A few years ago, I was using a CRM called Daylight.

And I was collecting and collating and gathering all this information about the contact, the emails and what I did, et cetera, et cetera, dogs names and so on.

This is what CRMs are supposed to be for, right?

but I never found myself going back and looking at all of the data.

Some of it, yes, but not all of it.

So then I realized after having this discussion, why are we hoarding all this information?

Just because it’s digital and it’s not paper, like stacks of paper.

In the old days, we had filing cabinets, so you’d have tens of thousands of filing cabinets in these big organizations. but we have filing cabinets and things as well.

But that’s kind of the same with computers.

If you keep collecting and hoarding all this information, you need more and more hard drive space, more and more server space.

Now, if you think about the amount of energy, the amount of money, but mainly the amount of energy we’re wasting, collecting data that we actually are not going to use in any way, what are we doing to our planet and to ourselves?

What are we seriously doing?

It’s crazy, right?

So why collect data?

Why take 10 photos and still keep them all?

Why not just delete them and get rid of them?

It’s just something that I’ve been thinking about since that article was written since I was in that meeting.

How we collect too much data. and we probably don’t need to.

Look at your systems, figure out where you can, you know, slim line your data input.

Automate, God forbid, some of it, if you can.

But think about the data that you actually need rather than data you just want to collect.

Anyway, that’s the video.

Have a great day, and I’ll see you in the next one.

As always, keep it simple.

Ciao.

Bye-bye.