Digital Minimalism Will Make Your Life Better
How to Marie Kondo your digital life
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In the same way that physical clutter can negatively impact your life, digital clutter can do the same thing unless you remove it.
Our digital lives have changed drastically over the past 20 years. Having a digital camera, an email address and a home computer were all novelties. Now smartphones, multiple email addresses and social profiles, and laptops are the staple of our lives.
As we get more devices and features, the digital “stuff” we acquire grows, but we don’t notice it because it’s all contained within a device.
When we talk about digital minimalism, there are a lot of different opinions on it, and even ideas about what exactly it means. I’m not talking about limiting internet use or the number of devices you own — that’s all part of it. The aspect of digital minimalism I’ll talk about is all the media, files, and apps we’ve accumulated — the digital clutter packed in our phones and computers.
What is Digital Clutter, and what’s wrong with it?
Digital clutter is the hoarding of digital files and the lack of organization. It’s dozens of files spread across your computer desktop screen. It’s tons of bad blurry photos that you have to scroll through on your phone to find the good ones. It’s pages and pages of apps on your phone. It’s searching through hundreds of emails trying to find that one you forgot to respond to. It’s constantly getting messages that your computer or phone is out of space whenever you need to save something important.
What’s wrong with that?
It wastes time, mental space, and takes away from real life. Finding the files you need to work on takes more time, reducing productivity. Trying to remember which emails you responded to and which you didn’t is a waste of mental energy. Scrolling through your photos trying to find the one you want to show is a distraction from life (not to mention annoyingly boring of the person waiting for you to find that photo).
