If a picture is worth a thousand words, then our smartphones are equipped to turn us into novelists within minutes. The average American currently has 582 photos saved on their cell phone, plus 13 unused phone apps, 83 bookmarked websites, 21 desktop icons and 210 gigabytes of cloud storage.

Digital hoarding is a sneaky problem—it’s like physical hoarding, but because most of it takes place in the virtual ether, it’s difficult to quantify until we start receiving cloud storage upgrade alerts or we’re told we’re running out of space on our phones while we’re trying to take a photograph. 

Amassing emails, bookmarking webpages, keeping duplicate files, maintaining text messages that date back years and taking an exorbitant number of photographs are all signs of digital hoarding....