Recently, I decided to do a digital declutter. This has been on my mind ever since I read Digital Minimalism, and I’ve half-heartedly implemented some aspects of a digital declutter, but never fully committed. All the recent stress, though, has had me reaching more and more for cheap distractions, like phone games, scrolling through social media, and such like.
The goal is to create some mental space to be able to examine what works best for my life. What will best help me accomplish what I want to accomplish?
Here are some at actions I took before starting, to support me in this process:
- Talked to my wife about it. As my partner in life, and the person who knows me best, she can help me be accountable and reflect on how I’m changing.
- Made a list of categories of services that I spend my time on, and how I wanted to handle that. For example, for Twitter, I needed to change my password to something I can’t remember (so that I must use a password manager to access Twitter).
- Made a new user on my laptop dedicated to work. I set up a new work-only Protonmail email account, work-only Lastpass account, etc. By not having easy access to the passwords for distracting services, I make it more inconvenient to get on Facebook than just
Ctrl+T, F, Enter. Plus, it was a good opportunity to be more mindful of the services I wanted to use. Instead of the data-hungry Gmail, for example, I went with privacy-focused Protonmail. - Set up access controls through PAM to restrict my old account to be used only during certain times of the day.
- Removed various apps from my phone, and disabled the ones I couldn’t remove. I also made sure it would be inconvenient to get the passwords for services like Twitter on my phone.
- Decided on a time frame: November 28 – December 28.
During this time, I want to reflect on what high quality activities can replace my low quality ones. Instead of browsing the suggested articles that Google bombards me with, for example, perhaps it would be better to sign up for one or two high quality newsletters that cover topics I’m interested in.
So far, my preparations seem to be helping me stay focused. I expect there will be some difficulty adjusting and figuring out what works best for me, but I’m excited for the possibilities!
