Digital Minimalism: Protecting your attention and focus
Digital minimalism helps minimize anxiety and find more time for the things you love. Digital minimalism requires taking a deep look into the habits you’ve formed with your devices.
You need to find what you can’t live without.
Then get rid of the rest.
There’s 3 places you should start clearing the clutter.
- Apps
- Files
Sorting through the email clutter
Because we spend the most time with email, it’s easy for things to become overloaded
Most people live in their inbox using it as a to do list. This makes for a storage bin of clutter.
With a little time, this can be cleaned up.
- Start with unsubscribing from irrelevant mailing lists.
- Delete old emails in mass
- Save needed emails in an archive folder
You don’t need those apps
The older our phones get, the more clutter we store.
You end up with hundreds of apps you don’t use. If you haven’t used them in a month delete them. Start using their mobile site instead.
So many files
If you’re like me, you still have files from 2007.
There’s no reason to hang to a majority of them.
For the ones you need to keep, create an archive folder. Make sure the file name is easy to recognize the contents. 2017 tax returns.pdf is better than 041517 tax.pdf.
Spend 10 minutes a day organizing these 3 things.
You will never have to feel the anxiety of things to do.