The Retention Telephone Game (And How We Stop Playing It)

Let's be honest: if you've ever stared at a retention schedule, tried to match it to the actual record sitting in front of you, and thought “who wrote this thing, and have they ever done my job?” — you're not alone. And you're not wrong to wonder.

Here's the thing about retention schedules: they're written by one group of people, for records used by another, and generally applied by a third. And depending on where you work, that might be one very confused person wearing three hats — or it might be a whole cast of characters who never sit in the same room.

In a lot of places, the folks writing the retention schedule and the records manager applying it are the same person (hello, small shops doing it all). But in states like Washington, where we're lucky enough to have the State write our retention schedules for us, those are two entirely different groups. Add in the employees actually creating and using the records day to day, and you've got a third. And in Washington, there's a fourth: our archivists, who are trying to figure out what has archival value based on what they hear from the users/records managers and what's written in the schedule.

Four groups. Four different goals. And a whole lot of room for things to get lost in translation.

You need to do more than look at the records being created. You need everyone to be in it together, from all angles — because talking about what records you create and actually digging through a shared drive at 4:45pm to try and find the record to help you do your work are two very different experiences. And figuring out which record series applies to make sure you are on top of retention regulations?

That's a third experience entirely.

A lot of jurisdictions do try to loop in the people doing the work when schedules get written, and that's a great start. But it's easy for things to get confused  — not because anyone's doing it wrong, but because describing your job and living your job are not the same skill.

So here's where I've landed lately: four specific areas where I keep feeling that disconnect, and some ideas for closing the gap. Maybe none of this is fully solvable tomorrow. But solutions start as complaints, so let's get the conversation going.

1. How (and how often) retention schedules get updated

Our work is constantly changing, which means our retention schedules should be too. The problem isn't that schedules update — it's when. A surprise revision that lands in the middle of the year, right after you've spent January disposing of everything per the old schedule, is basically a records manager's nightmare. Now you're relabeling boxes you just finished labeling.

IDEA: Put updates on a predictable, once-a-year cycle — revised at year end, implemented January 1 — with a comment window that closes a few months before the revising starts. Records managers stop feeling blindsided, and everyone knows exactly when their input actually counts.

2. The “but I made this” problem

Let's be honest: some of the biggest pushback on records destruction has nothing to do with retention rules and everything to do with feelings. Someone spent hours — sometimes years — creating a record, and being told it can be destroyed can feel personal. This shows up most with long-tenured employees, and right now, especially in government, plenty of people have held the same seat for 20-plus years. That's a long time to get attached to paperwork.

The good news? National median job tenure keeps ticking down, so this particular flavor of chaos is likely to fade on its own over time. The better news is we don't have to wait for it.

IDEA: Normalize destruction as a standard, healthy part of the records lifecycle — not a personal insult — and train people specifically on the retention that applies to what they create, updating them when it changes. A retention “cheat sheet” by position would be a heavy lift to build for everyone at once, so start with the roles held by your longest-standing employees. That's where the attachment (and the risk) is highest.

3. How schedules are organized

Most retention schedules are broken into sections, or even split into entirely separate schedules by area of work — Utilities, Public Safety, Legal, and so on. Makes sense if you need something printable, because print format forces you to organize somehow. But it also means it's easy to miss the record series you actually need simply because you were looking in the wrong section.

IDEA: Move toward retention databases people can search dynamically instead of flipping and searching through sections hoping they guessed right. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is genuinely good at, and honestly, I've never been more ready for it to pull up a seat at the table.

4. Why nobody understands archival value

Archivists do work that is deeply important and deeply misunderstood. Most government employees — most people, period — have no idea what actually makes a record archival. They don't know that if a library already keeps the newspaper, the archives probably isn't racing to keep those same clippings too. Or that just because something's old and printed on rice paper doesn't automatically make it significant. Sometimes old just means old.

IDEA: Basic archival training for every records manager, taught directly by archivists. Straight from the source, so the “why” behind archival decisions stops being a mystery.

Where this leaves us

None of this fixes itself overnight, and I'm not pretending four bullet points solve a structural disconnect that's been decades in the making. But I'd rather put the frustration — and the ideas — out into the world than just vent about it privately. If you've felt any of this in your own shop, I'd genuinely love to hear how you're handling it. Let's get the conversation started, and see where it takes us.