Why Digital Minimalism should be your top priority

Let me start off with something that makes a lot of sense in the current digital era:

You are not the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. You are the average of the 5 apps that you use the most.

In this digital era, where people talk to their phones more than the person next to them, it’s important to pay conscious attention to where our time is going. You can pick up your phone just like that and instagram/facebook or any app that works on user engagement more than user experience can hook you up for hours with it’s never ending intelligent recommendation.

This is just bad! I personally feel there’s a cc-camera type of device out there that’s continuously screening my thoughts.

Hey, isn’t it great?? I’m only getting to see what I’m interested in. Why the fuss?

Well, it is the most useless thing. It drains your time without your knowledge. It drains your mental capacity. Let me give you an example, you randomly had a thought about something say a trip to a beach city. You didn’t really have a serious intention to travel but it was just one though out of the million other thoughts we go through each day. However, you take one step ahead and search about the beach cities near by your place and check out few photos and close it. This moment never ends with you closing the chrome browser. The thought never ends there. These applications get the information that you have a thought of going to a beach from your cookies, and start recommending. You open youtube, there’s a beach recommendation. Instagram yes. Facebook yes. It’s everywhere. Being a developer, I’m seeing such ads on the stack overflow page too.

The reason to point this out is that, what was a normal thought amongst million other thoughts, the moment you digitalized the thought by searching it on the web, it is amplified. This is just totally unnecessary.

While there are 100’s of apps that track the time spent on social media and send alerts, well, it’s not about how much time you’ve spent on the social media but about how many times are you picking it up? So you spend an hour a day on digital media but how many pick ups?

While it’s important to keep in touch with the current trends and people through digital/social media, just ask yourself is it really necessary to use/open those applications for 10 times a day? We can just do fine with a weekly twice or thrice catch up with friends or the current trends.

Don’t let these apps steal your valuable time. The key is to cut down number of times the phone is being picked up.

The number of times you pick up a phone is directly proportional to your distraction quotient.

Be conscious of how or where the time is going. It’s totally okay even if the day is boring, try to pass time with some other means. In fact, put yourself into the shoes of being bored. You’ll eventually find a hobby.

In conclusion, by using digital medium as a means to pass time:

1. There’s a device screening your thoughts.

2. Negativity is amplified.

3. Your time is stolen.

Few immediate things that you can start practising, these are tangible and practical steps that can help achieve the goal:

1. Start using any web search engine that is not hungry for cookie data. Ex – DuckDuckGo (I’ve been using this since a year now)
2. Sign off from your Youtube accounts and just use the browser on your phone for Youtube. Don’t let Youtube decide how you are going to spend an hour in your day ( if you can’t sign off, then at least pause the search and watch history in the settings)
3. Do not use remember me option on Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin etc. make sure you got to type in each time you pick up your phone and use it. Log off immediately once you are done.
4. Keep cleaning your browser cache periodically. (Ideally, once every 3 days if it’s your work laptop, otherwise everyday if it’s your phone or personal laptop)
5. Be conscious of how many times in a day are you picking up the phone. This explains how we are part of a distracted world.
6. Stop being available for the notifications and turn them off for all your apps unless the extremely important ones like the bank related apps. Use them when you need not when they notify you.

Be mindful. Follow a minimalistic approach towards digital media. I’ve followed it and reaped numerous benefits. I’ll probably write another post on how it helped me but I’ll confine this post to the “why” part of practicing digital minimalism.