Digital Minimalism: Boot Camp.
What is Digital Minimalism?
Digital Minimalism refers to your Digital Lifestyle where you try and maintain a clutter-free, highly functional environment.
Why Digital Minimalism?
This particular lifestyle has the potential to minimise your digital footprint, lessen your online time, make you more productive and definitely provide a grateful social media circle.
Practising Digital Minimalism
Declutter & Lose the unwanted baggage.
You might be carrying around a lot of useless weight on your phones or computers.
Start with the apps — delete all apps that you haven’t opened in a month! You can use a third party cleanup software to remove any residue.
Move on to your documents, photos and videos! Yeah, precious memories, alternative 1000 words blah blah but- when combined with the family whatsapp group trolls, accidental screenshots, your neighbour’s vacation pictures, medical hoaxes- these things will take up a lot of digital space.
Select the ones that you really want to keep and transfer it to an external drive or a cloud service (like google drive or dropbox).
For writing and documentation, use a cloud based system like Evernote. At the least, it will remove the infinity duplicates of Untitled.doc from your desktop!
Check your inbox! Like how you would clear your physical mails, do make it a habit to clean your inbox. Create folders to keep important mails, mails to be replied etc. Unsubscribe from commercial emailers. This will reduce your digital footprint as well.
Minimise your Digital Footprint.
Your online activities can be collectively called Digital Footprint. Try and minimise your online time and use that time productively.
Start with deleting duplicate/ redundant social accounts. Ideally one should only have two email accounts. One for office use and one for personal use.
Bookmark frequently visited websites and organize them in folders on your browser.
Do Not be the Spammer!
Be sensible while using digital media. Fight the urge to click “like” on every other thing that you see on the internet. Social media platforms uses an AI algorithm to analyse your online preferences from your likes to customise the content that will be provided to you. So choose wisely.
Try to unfriend those who are constantly posting spam on their timeline — if they are someone you dont want to hurt, just unfollow them.
Remove yourself from unwanted groups (on facebook, whatsapp, telegram etc).
Use it, Dont own it.
Why do you want to keep 16 Terrabytes of TV shows when you have Netflix! Use your personal storage space for something very important and leave the media server job to a service provider!
Let this be the starting point — You will be more focused, productive and happy while using digital media next time!