I realized that deleting local copies of files early and often is better than keeping them forever.

I'm the kind of person who will work on something, share their work, and then just let the file I had linger around indefinitely. You never know, it's better to have a local copy, it can save the day. Or you keep it at hand when you're offline. And do I really need a reason to keep a copy of the file I was working on anyway? Hoarding files and keeping them forever is tempting.

The one thing I've overlook in the past is context. When I produce or get a file, I do so in a specific context. But if I want to do some cleanup later I will certainly have lost that context, or have fragments of it. I won’t know if I can delete it safely or not, so I will keep it forever. The longer a file has been around, the more difficult it becomes to delete it.

The best thing I can do in a work context is to make it not a me-problem. Whenever I get or produce a file, I make sure there is a copy of it in a company shared drive, and I delete it from my machine as soon as possible.

Throwing it over the fence is bad behavior of course, so I make sure it’s stored somewhere with as much context as possible for people who need to use it. My machine stays decluttered, and if it’s stolen I "just" lose hardware, I have a safe copy of my work data, and there is little to leak on my (encrypted) disk.

Note: this is true for documents because all versioning systems are terrible. This is not true for code thanks to git and the like.