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Becoming the Digital Essentialist
My strategies for decluttering digitally in a hyper-connected world
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
— Herbert A. Simon
After making my morning coffee, and settling in for the day I check my emails. Gmail has so graciously organized these emails according to my behaviours around the consumption of this content in the past. Cool.
There is an unrelenting stream of attention-grasping content being stored away for potential ingestion at a later time. I just have to look in my inbox, social, promotions - or quite possibly - spam folders to uncover it all.
One day after opening up a handful of email subscriptions to authors and experts, I noticed that I felt exhausted and somewhat anxious.
The digital onslaught to my inbox was becoming too much. I wanted an out.
My ego’s final excuse was, “Hey, you’ve followed these people for this long, better keep it going.”
I decided to stop listening to that voice. Instead I asked myself, “Am I getting value out of this?” I wasn’t. So I decided to axe a couple of them.
It felt good.
I continued on for a few more minutes.
I felt better.
The next day, I proceeded to do the same thing. It finally reached a tipping point of insight in which I realized: the minimalist movement is not just for material possessions. I can, and should declutter my digital world as well.
The amount of anxiety and stress our inboxes cause can be tremendous. And that’s just our emails. Let alone our social media, various apps, and other forms of digital consumption. Added all together, it seems insurmountable. And maybe that’s the point — where the eyes go, economies go. Attention is money.
In order to free myself from this mental clutter, I looked to refine more.
Here are a few of the areas that I stripped down to their most essential parts, in order to live the most mindful life in my own respective digital world.
