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Spring cleaning 🌷 🧺 ☀️ 🧹

Meg Bailey

Hi Confluence Community!

While the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere was *technically* March 20th, it feels like spring finally (!) arrived in my neck of the woods this week. I’m working with the windows open and not to be too cliched but the sun is shining, birds are chirping, flowers are blooming and everything’s starting to green up. 🌷

I always forget what a difference the shift in seasons makes! The extra hours of daylight have me feeling refreshed, energized, and motivated to tackle some spring cleaning. ☀️

In my digital workspace, this means everything from deleting those screenshots that have accumulated on my desktop to sifting through a scary amount of open tabs (#BrowserWindowHoarderStatus). 🧹

One task I just started to tackle is cleaning up my Confluence. For me, this includes auditing pages I’ve created in both my Personal and Team spaces to determine what should stay, what needs to be updated, what can be consolidated, and what can be archived. While I’ve got a handle on the update/consolidate part, I’m not so decisive when it comes to what should stay and what should go.

So, I’d love to hear from you (admins and end users alike!): How do you decide when it’s time to get rid of a Confluence page? Let me know your best tips for cleaning up a Confluence space 🙂

Comments

Ismael Jimoh

I am not an expert here but the following are potential possibilities to check:

Check is the data on the page still valid or is it still relevant? If yes, keep. If no, does it need tweaking or it can be archived and perform the necessary next step.
Search for all pages older than a specific date and using analytics bundled with Confluence, check if the last time the page was viewed. If recent and there’s a good number of views to match the expectation then I’ll keep it otherwise straight to archive.
Space-wise, I mostly would look for spaces created for specific projects. Ask myself if the project has been completed and if yes check with the project team if they need it for reference or not. Depending on their answer, I’ll decide to archive the said project.
Audit page and space permissions and adjust accordingly
If you are the Confluence administrator, audit licensed users and grant or revoke licenses accordingly.

There may be more so I am also looking forward to seeing what others have to say.

Meg Bailey

Oooo these are all great tips, thank you @Ismael Jimoh! I especially like your suggestion of filtering for pages of a certain age and then using page analytics to evaluate engagement. There are some "evergreen" pages that stay relevant and maintain consistent engagement over time, and others that obviously don't and collect dust. But, looking at when a page was last viewed may offer additional insight for content that deviates from those two categories, like an older page that's been untouched for x amount of time but was recently viewed as it's relevant to a new project.

Elizabeth Barr

So much THIS ^^^

Depending on use case, you may have pages that don't get updated very often and that's fine (i.e. policies and procedures) BUT if they haven't been updated in a long time AND no one has looked at them in a long time? Might be time to archive. Use those sweet, sweet analytics to figure this out!

Andy Gladstone

OK. Guilty as charged for not keeping my personal Confluence space as tidy as it should be. I hold on to some of my drafts and babies too long, and should make better use of the archive and delete functions. I have a hard time judging when the useful life of one of my pages has expired.

However, organizationally the Space Admins are always doing a good job keeping most content relevant and up to date. In general we don't need to retire/archive any pages as most of them are living documents that evolve with our business practices. When a page is specific to a procedure or process that has been phased out, it will be archived by the space admin. I estimate that is only necessary in 10% of our pages. Placing trust in the Space Admins has created a sense of shared responsibility for their area of subject matter expertise to ensure the entire organization is searching for and digesting the most relevant content.

Meg Bailey

Great point about deferring to Space Admins for their expertise on the relevancy of content!

For content in my Personal Space, I'm trying to be more realistic about what I have the capacity for. I love using it as a place to store half-baked ideas, WIP project plans that I'm not ready to share, etc. However, I'm realizing through my tidying that my messy page tree was beginning to function a bit like the terrifying amount of open tabs in my browser window... by keeping webpages open (or Connie pages in my personal space), I was perpetuating the idea that I could (and should) follow-through on all these ideas. 😅 I'm in the midst of evaluating those pages and hopefully busting the overwhelm they cause by determining:

Whether or not I have the bandwidth to implement whatever idea is captured in said page
The potential impact of said idea

If it's low impact and beyond my current bandwidth ➡️ archive/delete

If it's low impact but within my current bandwidth ➡️ consider why I haven't taken further action on it yet ➡️ archive unless it contributes to a high-priority stream of work

If it's high impact and beyond my current bandwidth ➡️ explore resources + opportunities to delegate ➡️ move to appropriate shared space

If it's high impact and within my current bandwidth ➡️ take action on next steps

Andy Gladstone

@Meg Bailey that's a great recipe for success. I am actually applying it to my Persona Space today. I'll track the results and update this post when I have them.

If it's low impact and beyond my current bandwidth ➡️ archive/delete (5)
If it's low impact but within my current bandwidth ➡️ consider why I haven't taken further action on it yet ➡️ archive unless it contributes to a high-priority stream of work (7)
If it's high impact and beyond my current bandwidth ➡️ explore resources + opportunities to delegate ➡️ move to appropriate shared space (2)
If it's high impact and within my current bandwidth ➡️ take action on next steps (92)

Meg Bailey

Can't wait to hear the results! And I can't take full credit for the framework – it was partially inspired by this play from the Atlassian Team Playbook: Allthethings Prioritization Matrix. 😄 Good luck!

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