Digital Minimalism
Digital Minimalism is really the ability to have less clutter of all your digital information and organize them in a way that brings value to you and easy access. The ability to organize your data, quick access to them as you need is very important. Society as we know it enables us with so much information overload that we receive constant junk mails, emails from retail companies we subscribe to and most times didn’t subscribe to. So many unimportant, less urgent emails thats take a lot of time away from us everyday.
There are many ways you can minimize and organize all of this information, I will only be discussing about my own experience on emails and actual paper mail I receive at home to what I subscribed or not. My experience since minimalism really has been asking myself the same question, which is “What brings value to my life? Does this thing or experience bring purposeful to my life?” it might sound weird at first but when you have a vision and purpose it becomes very easy.
I started with emails since I spent a lot of my time daily on emails, my day was driven by every emails I received. I would stop anything I was doing after each email, no structure or schedule to follow when it came to my day. I didn’t really have enough time in my day at least that was what I thought. Until, I started reorganizing and prioritizing what brought value to me. After this process, I got back so much time and became highly productive daily. In the past, the first thing I did every morning was look at my phone for emails and messages, I was driven by this technology and really did’t make sense why I kept doing this over and over again. Now I realize it’s something the new generation calls FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). It has been over 20 months now since I started my journey on minimalism, and I have since decluttered my digital life in a way to allow me to be more productive, more focus on key objectives and way more organized. The act of putting every document, files, emails, mail into a digital storage as given me so much of my time back. I consolidated to one email inbox, made sure I reduced my inbox by unsubscribing to a ton of useless emails.
I reorganized my email by forwarding all others to just one, deleted all folders and I had both an archived or delete (trash) folder available. I also recently in the past six months schedule checking my personal email twice a day and gradually over the past six months I only check it twice a week now. The perception of what is urgent is really what you make of it. Now, this might not work for everyone especially if you correspond daily on email, the rule of two and/or zero inbox strategy is most ideal.
Rule of Two
The idea of only checking emails twice a day and make sure it is not the first thing you do. Only check it when you have 5–15mins chunk of time to read, delete or archive emails. If you don’t have that timeframe then don’t even check it.
Zero Inbox
To have a zero inbox daily at least for those who work daily on emails. I tend to use this for work emails and start my day by clearing all emails either the beginning or end of the day.
Consolidating just paperwork I had or didn’t use was my third step, shredding sensitive paperwork also and unsubscribing to junk mail. I realized that my magazine subscriptions didn’t make sense when I only read articles based on my interests online on the News App was much better than paying for magazine subscriptions which I never had the time to read or enjoy. So I stopped all magazine subscriptions, read all the remaining magazines I had received and moved quickly into online viewing of the News App based on my interests, curated for me.
In doing this, I had an easy access to files and documents on the fly from all my devices through iCloud Drive. I do have a 500GB External HDD as a backup and I don’t save any document on my computer anymore, unless I’m working on passion projects. I foresee using my computer storage more for more videos, photos when editing and stuff. The goal is to live with less and being more organized as society tends to just bring more useless stuff and junk to us everyday.
IG: @adeoduwa
