My Digital Minimalism

En Español

Cover Photo by Kym Ellis on Unsplash

During the last months, I've practiced a new way of approaching technology, called Digital Minimalism. I think now it's a good time to open it up, and share it with the people who know me in person.

Let's start by explaining why I decided to start doing this. In the previous blog I wrote, I explained that I wanted to take a break from Social Media. I was feeling that I was spending too much time on it and getting almost nothing in return.

Suddenly I stumbled across a book called “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” by Cal Newport. The first thing that catch my attention was the Minimalism word in the title.

I consider myself a minimalistic person, in terms of the possession I own and the lifestyle I have, and this is exactly what I was looking for: introduce a minimalistic approach into my Digital life.

At the moment of writing this post, I already read the book twice. So yes, I liked it and recommend it to anyone! I would love to share my learnings regarding some topics it covers, in order to:

  1. Express my opinion and how I am planning to put it into practice
  2. Share it, in case you are looking to make some changes in your digital life and don't know how to do it, or it might be the case that you never even think of it as a problem.

Friendly reminder: Before jumping into the book, I would like to clarify that I am going to be talking about my life choices and the way I see things. By no means, I want to judge how other people decide to live their life :)

What is it exactly?

Digital Minimalism can be seen as a lifestyle, in which we are fully aware of the place that Technology plays in our life. The definition provided in the books is as follows:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

From here I learn two things:

  1. This philosophy doesn't mean that you have to stop using any kind of Digital Device or be fully disconnected from the world. It emphasizes using the technology in hand-picked activities, to be mind-full regarding the way we interact with the technology.
  2. We are constantly worried that we are not up-to-date about what's going on in our friends' life, in the city, news, etc., and in fact, we don't have to. It's totally fine to not know, your life is not going to change, promise.

Practices

One of the things I like about this book is the idea of Practices: a set of recommendations to apply the principles from above. In a nutshell, they are the formulas they gave in Chemistry or Physics to apply the theoretical concepts. Very handy!

In this part, I would describe the relevant ones for me, and how I am currently tackling them.

Don't Click “Like”

Besides the catchy title, this practice hides a quite strong meaning behind, that many people can't see (me including). Yes, it's related to the action of “Like” inside Facebook, but nowadays, you can find this feature in any Social Media platform: Heart on Instagram, Like and Retweet on Twitter, Like on YouTube, etc.

The whole problem with this feature is that it's the worst informative communication way that you can use when connecting with others. We are just sending one bit of information about the state of the sender. We think we are in touch with others, but instead, we are sending almost nothing ...

Instead of that, the book recommends acting more towards rich communication. For example, instead of leaving a like/comment, send a Private message in which you can schedule a meeting or call to keep up to date with this person. It will be way more personal, rich, and fulfilling, improving your relationships.

Consolidate Texting

Let's be clear, we all use any kind of messaging system, it can be WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, or even SMS. At the same time, we make the following assumption: whenever we receive a message from someone, we have to answer right away, because yeah ... we have to. And this is behavior, like it or not, makes us a slave to our phone.

This practice suggests that we keep our phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default. Making all the notifications on our phones silent, so we are not going to get interrupted by these annoying notifications anymore.

In my experience, this has worked out. It took me some weeks to get used to it because besides not receiving the notifications directly into my phone, I was opening the app and checking them manually. But overall, I check my messages less frequently than before.

The last thing about this point is that many people might get annoyed about your delay to answering, they are simply not used to this kind of communication. In my experience, nothing will happen and in case they are interested in talking with you, they will continue reaching to you.

Delete social media from your phone

I used to consider myself an addict on Facebook when that platform was widely used among my group of friends. I remember sitting on my computer, opening the Home Page, and scrolling endlessly to check the status of my “friends”, to see what they are up to, every day, for hours and hours ...

After the mobiles got better, we all downloaded Social Media apps, and the number of hours that we spent scrolling increased enormously. Now any idle moment, waiting for the Bus, queueing in the Supermarket, or even in the restroom, is going to be the perfect excuse to open our Social Media and start the scrolling game.

This practice recommends you stay far away from the mobile versions of these services. You can still have them accessible through the computer, in case you still want to use them or check what's going on. But as soon as you don't have the app installed anymore, you are going to open it fewer times on Social Media.

And on top of that, you can use all these idle moments to your advantage! In my case, I am carrying always with me a book in my bag or something you can allow yourself to stare at the wall and think about your thoughts. Having thoughts from other people coming to you every single minute is super tiring, and we don't realize it.

My practice – Free Sundays

I developed this practice by myself, without reading it somewhere on the web or any book, and honestly is one of the golden rules that I follow nowadays.

The idea is quite simple: do NOT schedule anything for Sundays. No meeting. No sports. Nothing. Leave it as a blank spot in your week, and let your brain rest.

During this day you can allow yourself to work on the things that you always want to work on, but never find time during the week:

My only recommendation is not to push yourself. Take it slow, and enjoy the day before starting the next week :)

Last Words

It took me like a month to finish this post, and I am so happy to be able to share my opinion on this topic with my friends and family! I truly think that we have to be more aware of how we deal with our digital life before it will represent a problem to us and our relatives.

I hope you like the reading, if so please reach to me telling me your own opinion. Most probably you know how to find me :)

Thanks for reading.

Ema