Cut the Clutter, Ideas will Flutter

National Clean Out Your Computer Day

Data minimization can support innovation in several ways. Cluttered hard drives can slow down computers, which negatively impacts productivity. Keeping too much old or irrelevant information also increases the chances that someone will need to pause their work to search through records during a legal inquiry or public records request. Those kinds of interruptions pull away time and attention from the real work your team is trying to accomplish. 

Cleaning out your computer helps reduce those burdens and risks. 

National Clean Out Your Computer Day is our favorite holiday, and here are some steps that you can follow to really make the most of it: 

• Open up our list of Transitory records and our General Records Retention Schedule 
• Rid yourself of garbage, guard the gold! Consider:  
  • What is it? When is it from?  
  • How is it used? What happens with this record? 
• Empty your Downloads folder 
• Search your computer for the term “screenshot” and “draft” as those are likely to be files of temporary value 
• Empty your Deleted Items folder in your email 
• UW-IT agrees that you should not be storing files on your Desktop 
  • Delete what you can from your Desktop, and save records of continuing value somewhere that is backed up 
  • If there are files that you are not sure about deleting, you can put them all in a folder called “Weeding” and go through it at a later time 
• Deal with free floating files on the top level of a shared drive. These are distracting, and when not associated with a function, it is difficult to identify their retention. Delete them, move them to the right place, or move them into the “Weeding” Folder 
• On your office’s shared drive, check if materials are still within retention if:  
  • They are among the oldest files saved 
  • They are named after a person who no longer works there 

Plan ahead and Records Management staff can attend a future electronic storage clean-up day in your office. Make an even bigger celebration next year! 

Top 5 Tips for Figuring Out Retention

We often hear that it is hard for people to know where to start when they are trying to figure out how long they need to keep their records. It is the function and the content rather than the format that determines the retention period. We know there are often many caveats, (and many times we might say to you “it depends!”) but we are here to share our expert advice.  

Our program has many useful resources, that you can spend all sorts of time gleaning wisdom from. But in an attempt to make records retention easier to navigate, we have distilled the process into Five Top Tips for Figuring Out Retention. Check it out and put your office on the fast track to success. 

The Records Management Playbook: Don’t Fumble Your Data

After the weekend’s big game, get ready for the weekday’s big cleanup. Take inspiration from the Superbowl and apply it to your records management!

• Go on offense:
  • Make sure all new employees in your office take our Introduction to Records Management Training

• Build your defense:
  • Get the back of the house cleaned up by using the Clean-out Checklist
• Avoid penalty calls from the instant replay:
  • Audits and public records requests will have you looking back on what you have, but having less means that is easier to do! Make sure to follow the retention
• Create a highlight reel:
  • Instead of over-retaining anything that might be useful for future business needs, make a summary document that includes the pieces of information that could be most useful while lessening risk for the UW
  • This includes formalizing changes in procedures to reference in the future as opposed to keeping all the emails that might describe a past situation

General Schedule Updates

Effective Immediately

The following record series were recently added to the UW General Records Retention Schedule:

Controlled Substance Records – Inventory and Disposal: 2 years after end of calendar year