Tag: Digital minimalism

A Digital Minimalists Guide to Technology

One of the main reasons I started this website is because I wanted to show you that it was possible to become a digital minimalist and still use technology to enhance your life.

I’m a heavy technology user. Being in IT and the fact that I run a website means that just saying no to all technology is a nonstarter. However, that doesn’t mean that I have to let technology dictate my life.

Digital minimalists are smart about how they use technology and they control the technology rather than the other way around.

Digital Minimalists and Social Media

Social Media is probably the biggest obstacle to most people trying to become digital minimalists. Social Media has a place in our society and unfortunately it tends to be more or less embedded in ways that you can’t escape.

While it is possible to survive without Social Media, there are certain benefits to it that you lose by removing yourself from it. Now I am not against Social Media. I use it myself for various things. However, it’s important for digital minimalists to evaluate their relationship with Social Media and how it is interwoven into their day to day lives. I’m going to go over some suggestions for each of the major platforms:

Facebook

Facebook has unfortunately embedded itself deep into our society. I dislike Facebook but still end up using it because it offers functions that I can’t get anywhere else.

First and foremost, the Marketplace is better than any of the alternatives where I live. Second, things like Buy-Nothing groups seem to only exist on Facebook in my local area.

As a digital minimalist, I recommend assessing what do you actually use Facebook for. Do you really need it to keep up with your family and friends or can that be better done by a phone call or a text message?

I recommend taking the following actions:

  • Remove any friends that you really don’t care about keeping in contact with. Do you really care about that guy you went to high school with 20 years ago?
  • Unsubscribe and unfollow any groups or things you’ve ‘Liked’ over the years that don’t provide value. For example, I unsubscribed from various news sites that I followed on Facebook and other things that I thought were cool or interesting at the time.
  • If you have friends who post things that are controversial, mostly politics or religion, hide their posts so you can’t see them. This makes it so that you can still go to their page if you want to view what they are saying, but you are less likely to get sucked in and involved in a probably non-productive back and forth conversation with someone in their comments section.

Instagram

Depending on your day to day activities, you may be able to get rid of this. Largely Instagram is a time sink, but it absolutely can provide value. I find a lot of restaurants and small businesses will communicate to their customers through Instagram. This makes it very difficult even for a digital minimalist, to get rid of it. As such, I recommend the following actions:

  • Unfollow anyone you don’t interact with on a continual basis. Keep your list down to a minimum.
  • Unfollow anyone who posts controversial items that may show up in your feed.
  • Only browse instagram with your sound turned off.
  • Choose to sort your list from Newest to Oldest.
  • Turn on ‘Snooze suggested posts from feed’. Unfortunately you have to do this every 30 days, but it keeps random stuff from popping up on your Instagram feed.

Twitter (X)

Twitter, otherwise known as X has become increasingly toxic and useless. Where it used to be a great source of breaking information, changes made to the platform have made it far less useful. As such, a digital minimalist is unlikely to get any value from this platform and I highly recommend deleting it.

SnapChat

This social platform is completely useless. It provides no value and should be deleted. It’s one and only purpose is to try and retain users on its platform.

TikTok

While this platform can contain useful information, the amount of time that you have to spend to get the algorithm to show you exactly what is useful to you is way beyond anything you should do as a digital minimalist. By design they try to keep you on the platform as long as possible. I recommend deleting it.

Reddit

I have a love hate relationship with Reddit. Of all the social media sites, this is the one I spend the most time on and have never been able to break with. Mostly because by the nature of the platform, it contains a ton of useful information. Even as a digital minimalist, this one is hard to break because one of my favorite subreddits is /r/digitalminimalism. I recommend the following:

  • Unsubscribe from any controversial subreddits like /r/politics. This will reduce the chances of you getting into an emotionally charged conversation with someone that keeps you coming back to the platform.
  • Reduce your subreddits to only specific things that are important to you. I only subscribe to 11 subreddits now and it’s all items that are important to my day to day life.
  • Only browse through the Web. Delete the app. This makes it so that you can’t just open the app and doom scroll.
  • Don’t save your password on the site. Force yourself to type it in every single time you want to view Reddit. This makes you think twice before logging in.

LinkedIn

If you are wasting a ton of time on LinkedIn, well I don’t know how. LinkedIn is great for professionals. I keep mine up to date because you never know when the job market is going to turn or who might reach out to you. Keep this and keep it up to date. LinkedIn is boring and that is how it is meant to be.

Digital Minimalists and Devices

One of the main things I see with Digital Minimalists is that they either want to dumb down their existing devices, use alternative devices, or just use less of them. All of these are valid things to do. So let’s tackle a few things:

Phones

The phone is generally the number one driver to people wanting to become digital minimalists. It was for me. I realized I spend way too much time on my phone for my own good and I was missing the world around me. And for what? In fact this is such a big driver that I wrote an entire article about it! But here are the cliff notes.

Apps

Be conscientious about what apps you install on your phone. If they are time sinks, get rid of them. You want all of the apps on your phone to serve a purpose. This means, get rid of games. Get rid of social media apps. Only keep apps that allow the phone to serve as a tool.

Layout

Arrange your phone layout in a way to reduce the amount of time that you spend on your screen. I make good use of widgets to keep all of my critical information available at a glance, sometimes even without unlocking my phone! For example, my daily to-do list is on my Lock Screen.

For everything else, I keep my screens on my phone to two. Everything critical is on my Home Screen so I don’t get tempted to go browsing and get sucked into my phone.

Screen Time

Consider using the built in tools for reducing screen time. There are tools you can use to force you to acknowledge that you’ve been on an app for too long. Sometimes that little nagging reminder is all you need to get off your screen.

Replacement

While I’m not a huge fan of this because I find way too much value in my iPhone, I see a lot of digital minimalists replacing their phones with something dumber. If you can get away with only having a flip phone, do it. It will save you money and you are far less likely to be glued to your phone. Or consider switching to a phone that supports far less features. Just remember, there are trade offs to this.

Tablets

As a digital minimalist, I love my iPad. I use it all the time. Now as we move forward, it’s important to keep in mind that becoming a digital minimalist doesn’t mean getting rid of technology. It means making it work for you. In this regard, the tablet is great for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, I love it because without it I would absolutely never workout. Staring at a blank wall while I’m biking or on the treadmill causes me to look at the time constantly and hate working out. My iPad is great for distracting me so I actually can workout.

Second, I love my iPad for reading books. Yes an eReader would do just as good, but I like to have one device that does everything. I found books were causing too much clutter in our home. So I got rid of most of them and have gone strictly digital.

Finally, I like my iPad because it allows me to separate what I do on devices. I removed most of my distractions from my phone. Including Reddit. So if I want to look at Reddit or do anything with Facebook, I have to go to my iPad. This means that I have to make a conscious decision to go get my iPad rather than just mindlessly scrolling.

Depending on your day to day routines, a tablet may or may not fit into it. But just because you are adopting the digital minimalist lifestyle doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the tablet.

Laptops

Laptops are a tough thing to part with. I still use mine all the time because there is just so much you can’t do with a tablet or a phone. If you can get rid of it, then great, but if you can’t, don’t worry about it.

Most digital minimalists have a laptop do perform day to day functions like paying bills online, looking up information, etc. Use the devices that work best for you!

Final Thoughts

Being a digital minimalist isn’t about getting rid of all your technology. It’s about making the technology work for you rather than you being beholden to the technology. There is so much more we can cover with technology. If there are any topics you’d like to hear more about, just let me know!

What Is Digital Minimalism?

What is Digital Minimalism? As I’ve been trying to bring more focus on Digital Minimalism into my life over the last year, this is a question that has come up a lot.

It’s not an easy answer either because Digital Minimalism much like a the ‘Minimalist Mindset’ varies depending on who you talk to. In this article I’ve boiled it down to the bare bones of what it is so that you can use it as a framework to adopt the Digital Minimalism lifestyle that works best for you.

Before we get into what Digital Minimalism actually is, lets address the elephant in the room. Why are you even here in the first place? The chances are that you realized that you spend way too much time attached to your phone, your tablet, your computer and you realized that it’s not healthy.

That’s how I started down this path in the first place and I think you’ll find that it’s how most people who are involved in the digital minimalist space got involved. Most of what I’ve written is with that theme in mind. With the ultimate goal being to take back the time from the screens and refocus on things that are more important to you in your life.

Let’s Define Digital Minimalism

Let’s start with the official definition of Digital Minimalism, it’s important to know the roots of where this movement started so that you can understand how it has evolved. Digital Minimalism was coined by Cal Newport back in 2016. He defined it as:

“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.”

Cal wrote a book called Digital Minimalism, it’s a fascinating read. I highly recommend checking it out. You can also check out Cal’s Blog. With the official definition out of the way, we can start to focus on what that actually means to us. 

Digital Minimalism And Technology

Now when most people hear the term Digital Minimalism, they think that it means that Digital Minimalists are against technology. When in fact, there is nothing further from the truth.

I absolutely love technology. I work in IT and techie gadgets and home automation are some of the coolest things in the world to me. If you look at our house, you definitely would not think that Digital Minimalism is even in our vocabulary. 

Digital Minimalism isn’t about ripping out the technology from your life, it’s about making the technology in your life work for you. A good way to look at it is that each application and technology that you use in your life has a value.

Whether that is a positive value or a negative value is what needs to be determined. For the most part, I’m not here to tell you what types of technology are positive or negative values in your life. Your situation is different from mine and what is valuable to me might be completely useless to you.

Once you know the value of a technology in your life, you can make the determination of whether it’s worth it to keep that technology in your life. I’ll go more in depth on this in another article.

At a high level the determination you make will be based on whether or not the technology is providing the positive value its supposed to or if the cons of using it outweigh the positives.

Once you’ve determined what technologies are worth keeping in your life and which ones aren’t, you can focus on optimizing those technologies that provide the most value to get more of your time back in your life. 

This is easy in theory but harder in actual practice. To achieve Digital Minimalism is more than just removing apps from your phone and stopping using certain technologies. It’s about changing the way that you interact with technology. 

This article is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Digital Minimalism. If you’re interested in learning more about Digital Minimalism, please check out my other articles on the topic.