Defining your digital priorities is the first step in reclaiming your time and attention in a world that never stops demanding both. Apps are designed to keep your scrolling, notifications are designed to suck you back into your phones, algorithms are designed to hook you so that you never truly log off. With all these different apps, technologies, devices, notifications, and algorithms competing for your time and attention, it’s overwhelming.
The average person checks their phone nearly 200 times per day and let’s be honest, that number actually seems pretty low. Just looking at my daily average, I’m at 82 pick-ups per day which figures in things from me switching podcasts, to putting in directions to take my kids to a new park, to looking up recipes for meal prep.
While most of my checks are intentional, that is because I spent a lot of time working on that habit. For most people those checks are not intentional at all. They are reflexive. These checks are done out of habit. Over time, that habit steals your hours, your focus, and your energy that you meant to spend on things that actually matter.
Enter Digital Minimalism. Actually more specifically, enter the practice of defining your digital priorities. This is the foundation of your intentional digital life.
Digital minimalism is not about living without technology or even restricting it. Please, throw that notion out the window. It’s just wrong! Digital minimalism is all about using your technology with intention.
It means that you get to decide which tools actually serve your life in a meaningful way and which ones are just noise that are dressed up as convenience. Once you start setting your digital priorities, you are finally able to stop reacting to your devices and start using them as tools.
5 Steps To Define Your Digital Priorities
So how does one actually go about defining their digital priorities? Well, I’m glad you asked! To help you out with this, I’ve put together five steps to help you define your digital priorities. These steps will help you build a more intentional online life and can assist you in actually controlling your screen time.
Step 1: Start With Your Core Values.
Before we go too far down this path, lets’ take a step back. Don’t delete any apps or adjust any settings just yet. This first step is all about reflection, not action. This is the most important step of the entire process.
Start by asking yourself two questions:
- What matters to me most right now?
- What do I want my digital life to support?
Here’s the thing about these two questions, they require you to be absolutely honest with yourself. You really need to reflect and think hard about what you actually want out of this stage of your life.
For example, you could want to develop deeper relationships with your family. Maybe you want to develop a new skill. Do you want to get healthier? Are you trying to advance your career? Perhaps you just want to grow spiritually or intellectually.
There is no wrong answer to this. Whatever your answers are, these are your core values. These are the lens of which you will look through as you define your digital priorities. This is your filter that says, if a piece of technology does not support your core values, it’s clutter. It doesn’t matter how popular or entertaining the app is or if everyone else is using it.
Let’s take social media as an example here. If one of your core values is deep focus and meaningful learning, then a platform that is built around rapid-fire short form content, endless scrolling, and constant distraction is going to go directly against that value.
Now that’s not an obligation to delete it immediately or even at all. However, you are obligated to be honest with yourself about whether it belongs in a life that is guided by your values.
This first step provides the moral compass for every decision that follows. Unless you’ve defined your values, you are just guessing.
Step 2: Identify What Truly Adds Value.
Before I get too far into this step, I want to take a step back and address a very common misconception: All screen time is bad.
This is not true and believing this will actively work against you. Sure, getting your screen time down to a reasonable amount of time is a very noble goal and depending on your daily screen time could quite possibly be good for both your physical and mental health. I mean nobody wants to be looking at their screen time and realizing that they are spending an average of 9 hours per day on TikTok. And yes, I’ve seen screenshots of that and worse before.
It’s important to realize that not all screen time is created equal. For example, my overall screen time 5 days per week starts at 8 hours per day because my job involves me working on a computer for 8 hours a day. This is screen time that is considered to be adding value because it’s how I am able to pay my bills.
Beyond just work things, you also need to remember that some screen time in your personal life is also valuable. For example, if you are video calling your parents who live in a different state, or using a fitness app to track your workouts, reading a long-form article to learn something new, or even taking an online class. All of these are genuinely enriching for your life and add value.
The goal of step two in defining your digital priorities is to separate those tools that add value to your life from those that drain you. You can do this through a very easy exercise:
For one week, write down every app, website, or digital tool that you use. Yes, I know it sounds obnoxious but bear with me because it does help. Next to each one, note how you feel after using it. Not during using it. After using it.
Note if you feel informed, inspired, connected, or productive. Likewise, note if you feel anxious, scattered, envious, or like you just wasted a bunch of time.
Keep those ones that consistently leave you in a better place. Ruthlessly get rid of the ones that don’t. There is no right or wrong choice in which ones to keep or delete. You don’t even have to delete things, you just have to be willing to question their value.
None of this step is about punishment. It’s all about protecting your time and energy for the things you actually care about.
Step 3: Define Your Non-Negotiables.
Let’s face it, we live in a digital world. This means that there are some things in life that are absolutely essential and we can’t get away with them. They may not be fun things, they may cause us stress and anxiety, and we may hate them. But there are tasks and tools that we genuinely can’t function without in the modern digital world. This could be either professionally or personally.
When you are defining your digital priorities, you have to consider things that are absolutely essential to your life. Some good examples of this are:
- Work emails or work messaging platforms
- Online banking platforms that allow you to manage your finances
- Completing coursework or professional development
- Communication with family or caregivers
- Tools you use to run a business or side project.
These are your non-negotiables. Write them down and be very specific.
“Scrolling Facebook” is not non-negotiable. Not unless doomscrolling is one of your core values, which I really hope it is not. “Using my phone” likewise is also not a non-negotiable. Something like ‘Submitting my coursework through Blackboard between 8-10 PM” is a good example of a non-negotiable.
When you identified the essentials, then everything else becomes optional. This means every app, platform, or notification that isn’t essential can be evaluated and eliminated without guilt.
For myself, this is where I found a lot more freedom in my life. I used to spend hours on Facebook. No, I wasn’t a 9 hours per day on Facebook guy, but definitely upwards of 3-4 hours. I took a very hard look at what I considered essentials on my phone and doomscrolling Facebook did not make that cut.
Just the elimination of Facebook from my phone, not even deleting my account freed up tons of time in my life to spend time with my family, with my friends, to focus on studying. That was just one app. Once I started disabling notifications, getting rid of anything that I decided wasn’t essential, and just generally clearing up my phone I got hours back in my day.
If you think I’m exaggerating, before I started down my digital minimalism journey my daily screen time on my phone was on average 8.5 hours per day. Looking back I don’t even known how I managed to spend that much time on my phone, but I do remember distinctly that I was not a very happy person. My average screen time now is roughly 1 hour 45 minutes.
The difference in my life was huge. My mood improved, my anxiety was reduced and my life became better from it.
You can do this too. When you are able to name what is truly essential, the digital noise that fills your life suddenly doesn’t feel so necessary. That group chat you check compulsively? Optional. That news app you are checking for updates every 20 minutes? Also optional. That social media platform that you use because you’ve always been on it? Completely optional.
You get to choose your digital priorities. Before you can do that, you have to know what is non-negotiable.
Step 4: Set Boundaries That Reflect Your Priorities.
Great, so you know your digital priorities. Now you have to protect them. This is where most people slip up. If you don’t built structures to support your intentions, you are setting yourself up for failure.
When it comes to your digital life, there are three types of boundaries that you should focus on:
Time Boundaries
This means limiting certain apps or platforms to specific windows of the day. You might choose to limit social media to a 30 minute block in the evening rather than throughout the day. You might choose to check email at 9 AM and 3 PM rather than every time a notification comes in. When you set time boundaries, it puts you in charge your day rather than your phone.
Space Boundaries
This is all about keeping devices out of environments where they don’t belong. The most common example of this is the bedroom. The research on this is clear. Having your phone within an arms’s reach while you sleep disrupts rest and creates the temptation to check it if you wake up in the middle of the night.
The dinner table is probably the second most common example of this. Personally we implemented screen-free dinner times when we had kids. I think it’s very important to instill in the kids at an early age that the phone does not belong out at the dinner table. We want it to be a place where we are together as a family and the phone is a distraction. Sure there are exceptions and yes, sometimes we slip up. The goal isn’t perfection.
When your physical spaces are protected, the relationships, conversations, and moments that happen in them get protected too.
Notification Boundaries
Of the three main types of boundaries, notifications is going to be the one you notice the impact of the most immediately. The average person gets dozens if not hundreds of notifications per day.
Each notification is a little interruption with a bullhorn going “Hey, look at me! Hey! Yeah you! I’m more important than anything else you are doing!”. Each one of them is designed to interrupt you and hijack your attention. And quite often, it works.
Disable all non-essential notifications. Force your apps to wait for you rather than allowing them to train you to drop everything and respond every time they pop up on your screen.
When you are setting your digital priorities, it means setting your priorities around when and where you engage with your digital life. This small shift alone can make a huge difference in how present and focused you are throughout the day.
Now I know this might feel overwhelming. Fortunately, you don’t have to do all three at once. Pick a boundary in one of the three areas and commit to it for two weeks before adding another. Small but sustainable changes can beat sweeping overhauls that only last a few days.
5. Revisit And Realign Regularly.
The final and most important step in setting your digital priorities is to revisit and realign. This is important because life is not static. This means that your digital priorities shouldn’t be either.
Just because you use certain apps or develop habits that serve you well today doesn’t mean that they will a year from now. Likewise, those apps and habits you developed two years ago might be actively working against you today.
Life changes. A new job, a new relationship, a new health goal, or a new hobby all can and should reshape what belongs in your digital life.
For those of you with children, this shift is huge. I can tell you first hand. Remember when I said I used to spend 4.5 hours plus on Facebook? I learned very quickly you can’t do that with a newborn. Instead I spent my time just hoping to get a tiny bit of sleep. All my digital habits that worked before were completely misaligned with having kids. While entertainment was prioritized before, I learned to shift my digital priorities so that I could focus on family rather than on what was happening on social media.
The biggest reason why revisiting and realigning regularly is so important is that what you need from technology changes, and your digital life has to change with it.
So it’s important to make it quarterly or even monthly habit to sit down ask yourself three honest questions:
- What’s working well digitally right now?
- What feels excessive or out of alignment?
- What needs to change?
This regular reflection keeps your digital habits connected to your real world goals. If you don’t reflect, your old habits creep back, new platforms sneak in, and before long you are back to reacting instead of directing.
Just like every other area of intentional living such as finances, fitness goals, or relationships; your digital life deserves ongoing attention.
The Goal Isn’t Perfection, It’s Purpose
The goal of setting digital priorities isn’t perfection. There is no digital minimalism police. No checklists saying you have to do certain things to be a digital minimalist. There isn’t anyone who is going to look at your screen time report and tell you that you are doing it wrong.
Well I guess that’s not entirely true. Feel free to send me your screen time report and I will happily tell you that you’re doing it wrong. I won’t be accurate, but I’ll happily tell you if that’s what you want to hear.
The point of this all is that this practice is personal and it looks different for everyone. What matters is that your digital life and your digital priorities reflect your values. Not the values of the companies whose products you are using. Not the habits of the people around you. And certainly not the defaults that were set on your devices the day you bought them.
Taking the time to define your digital priorities can make a shift where you stop feeling overwhelmed by the endless noice. You start noticing when tools are serving you rather than pulling you away from things that matter. You start feeling less like your devices own you and more like you own them.
Start with your values. Define your digital priorities. Protect them. Then revisit them often.
Your attention is valuable and it’s worth protecting.