4 Ways to minimize digital clutter and streamline your system
“Whenever most systems — such as airports, freeways, and other such things — exceed about 90 percent capacity, efficiency drops massively. Not just slightly, but massively.” ~ Matt Perman
Ever noticed how quickly traffic goes from sluggish to standstill? In his book (What’s Best Next), Perman identifies the culprit: “the ringing effect.” Once you cross a certain threshold, the impact of small changes compounds — one swerve or piece of debris can cause a massive slowdown.
Now, consider the digital tools you use every day — email, task app, notes app, etc. If you have embraced the switch from paper to pixels, you have felt the ringing effect.
Too many different email threads, too many notes, too many events, too many tasks. We add more than we should, and then the factors begin ricocheting off each other.
You can respond by abandoning digital tools, but the benefits are hard to leave behind. Instead, I’ll explain two reasons our tools get overcrowded and four ways to take back control.
Problem: Digital is too easy to add
Digital tools have made it much easier to add tasks and items (notes, pins, cards, etc.) to our lists.
Smartphones and mobile apps allow us to take our lists with us everywhere, so we can add a new task at anytime, anywhere.
Typing is easier and faster than hand writing. Often you can add an item with a click or two — no typing required.
Also: Amazon Alexa, Google, Siri — when it works, nothing is easier than voice control.
Digital tools have also opened amazing automation opportunities. Services like Zapier, IFTTT, and more can automatically add new items to our list when specific criteria are met.
But this speed and ease leads to more items on our list. The easier it is to add something, the less we consider it’s importance before adding it.
The convenience of digital tools means we often add things indiscriminately.
The result? Too many things.
Solution 1 — Slow down
Slow things down to create some perspective before you add an item to your list.
The moment a task or idea occurs to us or we discover a book or movie, our natural tendency is to immediately save it, for fear of missing out. FOMO is a bad reason to keep an item. Slowing down can help us diagnose when fear is the primary motivation.
David Allen‘s GTD framework does this by distinguishing between Capture and Process stages. In the Capture step you collect, receive, or recognize a potentially significant item. In the Process step you review these items to clarify their significance — determine what to do, when, etc.
Doing these steps separately instead of all at once improves both of them.
Capturing is an inspired, creative act — you want to be open to the unexpected, not rigidly examining the worth of each possibility. Processing, on the other hand, is a logical evaluation.
If you try to mix the two, one or both of them suffers.
A dedicated capture tool is the best method I have found for this approach— a temporary holding place for tasks and ideas. Ideally it will cooperate with the other apps you use to send text or a URL to the appropriate list.
Personally, I use Drafts, which is designed specifically for this use case and does it brilliantly.
Solution 2 — Eliminate the secondary
“The tasks that have the greatest likelihood of derailing your progress are the ones you care about, but that aren’t truly important.” ~ James Clear
With so many options available to us, we can’t simply embrace every good opportunity or idea. If we do, we’ll dilute our efforts and make a small contribution in many areas instead of a major contribution in a few areas.
Warren Buffett recognized this and suggested making two lists — a master list of 25 goals and a sub-list of the top five.
The remaining 20 goals are the ones most likely to steal time from your top five. If you truly want to accomplish the top five, you need to focus on those five and avoid the other 20.
This same principle carries over to other lists, especially digital ones.
Have a list of things you’d like to do around the house? Pick three and delete or hide the rest.
Deleting is generally best. It sends a strong message to yourself that you will ignore that B-list idea until you finish the A-list.
If you can’t bring yourself to delete, find a way to hide the B-list. Put them in the archive, bury them in a sub-folder, or add them to a different app. Out of sight and off your radar.
“Decide what is really important to you and eliminate the rest.” ~ James Clear
Problem: Digital is too easy to keep
Not only are digital items easier to add, they are also easier to keep.
A sheet of paper is limited in size. Collections of paper require physical storage space.
Digital tools once had serious storage limits (floppy disc, anyone?), but those days are mostly over. Note apps let you add as many notes as you want. List apps can take every entry you throw at them.
The tools we use no longer impose an external limit on how many items we capture, which can quickly lead to the ringing effect.
Also, digital lists are malleable. We can reorder, sort, and filter, without having to recreate the list from scratch.
In contrast, if you want to reorder, sort, or filter a paper list you must revisit each item on it. This scrutiny prompts you to reevaluate tasks and goals, so you are less likely to keep everything.
Example: Moving to a new home forces you to confront each item you own and weigh whether it is worth keeping. The cost of transferring it may outweigh the value of keeping it.
Solution 3 — Set boundaries
Apps don’t limit how many items we can add to a list. But that doesn’t mean we can’t limit ourselves.
To avoid clutter and to make sure they play with and appreciate their toys, we limit how many our kids can keep. Periodically we identify and get rid of the neglected toys (usually after a birthday or Christmas gift deluge).
Like the Minimalist movement, the point is not elimination for elimination’s sake. Instead, the point is to highlight the possessions that bring the most joy.
“MINIMALISM: the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from them” ~ Joshua Becker, The More of Less
Take a look at each of your lists, and consider how many items it really needs.
Do you really need 50 different movies on your watch list? How many remodeling ideas do you need to pin? Are you even planning to remodel?
Remember — the ringing effect means the system grinds to a halt when you add too many items. Too many ideas or tasks will distract you from the ones that matter most.
Yes, if you cut your list down, you’ll have to remove some good things. But that process will also force you to decide what you really want, and which items are most important.
The list will be shorter but stronger. Quality over quantity.
How long is too long?
Cognitive overload is a subjective thing, so your mileage will vary. If ten items on your to-do list for today doesn’t freak you out, go for it. If five items overwhelms you, cut it to three.
Seven is a good starting point. The seven-digit telephone number was designed to fit the brain’s short-term memory capacity. If you can filter the list to hide certain items, you can let the overall list grow longer.
Reference lists you view infrequently can also be longer, but be honest about their purpose and what length is truly helpful. More options is not inherently better.
Solution 4 — Add friction
“If an entry isn’t even worth the effort to rewrite it, then it’s probably not that important. Get rid of it.” ~ The Bullet Journal website
Ryder Carrol’s journaling method has a thriving online community. Advocates embrace the limitations of a paper approach in part because it is slower and more painstaking.
In the basic Bullet Journal process, you must deal with every task at the end of the month. If you don’t complete a task, you either rewrite it on a new page (called “migration”) or you cross it out.
This added friction is startling at first, in an age when everything is being made easier. But Carrol is on to something.
When we make it easy to keep everything, we keep too much. We keep things because we’re afraid to face them — afraid to let go of them.
Fear is a terrible reason to hang on to an incomplete task. We need to face that task and admit that it isn’t realistic. Or that we added it because we couldn’t say “no.”
We don’t have to return to paper to learn the lesson or put it into practice. We do need a method for reviewing our commitments (to ourselves and others) and reevaluating each one.
Establish times throughout the year to sit down and face your lists (monthly, quarterly, etc). Commit to keeping what matters, not just what’s convenient.
And don’t let yourself off the hook. It may be worth adding an element of friction to the process.
Consider adapting the migration process to your digital items. If that goal or project is worth keeping around, isn’t it worth retyping?
“The purpose of migration is to distill the things that are truly worth the effort, to become aware of our own patterns and habits, and to separate the signal from the noise.” ~ The Bullet Journal website
The greatest defense against disorienting noise is a close familiarity with the orienting signal.
Clarity about your purpose and core values gives you a measuring stick for each list and the items on it. The answer to why you keep something needs to be meaningful.
Cal Newport contrasts the any benefit approach with the craftsman approach to selecting tools.
We shouldn’t adopt a tool, sign up for a service, or use a social media platform just because it offers some benefit. That’s the any benefit mentality, and it is too low a bar.
Instead, Newport advocates, we should be like a master craftsman. Select your tools carefully, weighing the costs and benefits each one brings in light of your craft.
Each of us is different, with unique skills and goals. In the same way, each of us should select the tools that fit what we’re trying to do in life.
We won’t reach that ideal by mindlessly adding items to our lists or apps to our phones.
We need a craftsman approach to our lives — especially the parts that we have digitized.
