Do you suffer from “app scatter?”

“App scatter” is a problem that affects many of us. Simply defined, it is the “speading of data across excessive apps or cloud services.”

Many of us suffer from this problem to one degree or another. A common case of app scatter looks like this: you have some important documents stored in google docs, some documents stored on your laptop’s “Documents” folder, some rough ideas sketched in a notepad app on your phone.

A setup like this makes it quite difficult to develop one organizational system for your work product or to backup your data, and generally contributes to disorganization.

Another area in which many of us suffer from app scatter is with our photos. We have some photos stored on our phones, and we’re not sure whether we’ve enabled cloud backup or not. We have another set of folders somewhere with photos from our DSLR’s. We have another set of folder somewhere with archived legacy photos exported from whatever program we used before cloud photo storage became a thing.

The cure to app scatter is simple: limit yourself to as few apps and data stores as possible, and have processes for handling your documents and files. Pick one area at a time (business documents, personal files, photos, side projects, source code repos). Discard content that is no longer useful, consolidate what is useful into ONE place (with a tiered backup strategy, of course), and come up with a sytem for handling future content in that area. You’ll be surprised at just how much mental space you’ll free up once this is complete!