Makerspace Management Episode 5: Memory Card Release aka Digital Hoarding

Hoarder Mentality

I don’t think any one of us planned on being a hoarder. I don’t remember any of my college prep classes telling me that part of the journey to being an educator is dealing with the hoarder mentality. It just develops over time. Year after year we deal with situations that we never want to be unprepared for again. The longer we teach the more of these situations occur and the more we stockpile our ammunition for when those events happen again.

Personally, I think I have always been a natural hoarder and I have been working very hard the last few years to break this cycle by eliminating items in my personal and professional life. The challenge for me is not to go back and buy new things to occupy the blanks spaces that I have worked hard to create. I often feel like something is missing and need to overcome this mindset.

I also think that as educators the mentality to stockpile is a survival tactic. Budget cuts, lack of funding, never having enough support, etc. Over time we learn to save and prepare for the worse so we can provide when needed. The concept of stuff is very much a reality. Removing items is not simply about throwing things away. It also involves emotions and tactics for surviving the job.

If you take 20 seconds this morning when you walk into your learning space and just stand in the middle and take about 20 deep breaths while looking around the room I bet you will see that we have things in our learning spaces that we know deep down need to be rid of and removed.

Why can’t we?

When we see these items it is not that we have emotions about the object itself, but rather how we feel about ourselves and that is where the rubber meets to road.

This journey is about clutter, but at a deeper level it is about ourselves and accepting who we are in this moment.

Today I want you to accept yourself for who you are and where you are in this learning journey. Pat yourself on the back and then realize that the things we let go of today will be step in the right direction.

The focus of this task is not necessarily the physical hoarding, but the digital hoarding. I don’t want to dive into files and online storage at this point. I want to focus on a more basic step and one that I think many of us can relate to. Memory cards, flash drives, etc. We all have them, but do we need them all?

Let’s take time to process, sort, and organize our files and digital lives to create one less collection of stress.

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