How to Reduce Digital Clutter and Stay Focused
I spend most of the day at the computer. When I’m not working, I spend my free time coding or blogging. When I take a break, I spend it staring at my phone. One of the problems with time spent watching screens is the digital clutter these habits have created in my life.
This post originally appeared on the RescueTime blog .
I don’t mean just files cluttering my desktop or a Facebook account full of friends I hardly know. I mean the intangible mess: the accounts I have on every social network; abandoned to-do lists left behind in every app I’ve ever tried; people with whom I always compare myself or try to win.
Spending so much time online every day makes life a mess. One in which you do not stop and do not think before picking up the phone at any time of downtime. One is when you start to feel obligated to post on social media twice a day because your followers expect it from you and you forgot to ask yourself if it even matters what people expect.
These habits creep into us so easily that we never have the opportunity to ask ourselves how we want to spend our time. Before we notice anything changing, it seems normal to fill our time – our lives – with screens.
But once we realize how cluttered our lives are with screens, social media, and expectations, we can find ways to make this clutter easier.
Transition to digital minimalism
Professor and writer Cal Newport is well known for his ideas about productivity – in particular, finding time and place for real, important work. So when Newport suggested dropping social media , people took notice.
We’ve all heard about the sabbatical in social networks , when someone leaves the social network for a short period of time, but in Newport also has a proposal for a long-term approach than a yo-yo when throwing and returning to the social network: digital minimalism …
Digital minimalism, Newport says, focuses on the idea of eliminating digital clutter and spending time only on things that add value to our lives.
Digital minimalism, he says, “is a philosophy that helps you wonder which digital communication tools (and the behaviors associated with those tools) are most beneficial to your life.”
Newport’s philosophy is based on the idea that we can improve our lives by “deliberately and aggressively removing low-value digital noise and optimizing [our] use of the tools that really matter.”
Of course, to embrace a philosophy that requires us to reduce our use of digital tools (and rely on them), we will inevitably have to face FOMO – the fear of missing out . Newport says one of the key beliefs underlying his philosophy of digital minimalism is that it’s not a bad thing to miss. We have to come to terms with the idea that we will miss some things and that this is okay. FOMO only holds us back, giving us a reason to remain chained to the accumulated digital confusion.
So if we admit that we still can’t keep up with everything and let go of FOMO, what next? How to actually get rid of the digital clutter that is building up in our lives?
Newport offers two alternatives for the transition to digital minimalism . The first is the subtractive approach. This includes removing any digital tools, services, or related activities that you believe do not add value to your life. Explore each element of the digital mess you’ve accumulated one by one and ask yourself if it deserves to stay. If not, remove it.
Another approach is the additive method. It involves removing everything initially and adding only those tools, services, or behaviors that truly serve your values.
With any of these approaches, you can use RescueTime to show you which distracting tools and services are taking the most of your time. If you take a subtractive approach, your RescueTime data can also show you how much more productive you are when you give up everything you can do without, and how that will change when you start adding things back to your life.
Either way, Newport said, the most important thing is to make sure you choose the best tool or service for each case, not just what is right for the job.
Choose the best tool for the job
Many of us fall prey to the easy way to find value in every digital tool we use. It’s not hard to make an argument for spending time on Facebook or having a Twitter account. You can even argue about the virtues of Snapchat – no one will regret having fun with your friends.
But Newport notes that we rarely take the time to find the best way to get the value we want. Instead, we try a new tool, find some value in it, and decide it’s a good reason to keep paying attention to it.
Newport offers a different approach to digital clutter in our lives. Whether you use his subtraction or addition method from the previous section, he recommends that you start by thinking about your values. What is important to you? What do you want to achieve from the way you spend your time?
Newport says that when you know your values, you can focus on finding the best tools to help you bring those values to life.
For example, if you previously thought that scrolling through Twitter every few minutes is helpful because it helps you stay on top of the news, and one of your values is to be up to date with local events, you can then assess whether Twitter is the best tool for doing this. to stay updated. about what’s happening in your area. You may find that a local newspaper or local news website’s RSS feed is the best tool to help you realize this special value.
Protect your time
One of the inevitable consequences of digital clutter is that it keeps us busy. If you fill your time with email, social media, and mindlessly watching other people’s updates, we’ll have little time for the real work. Our life is busy with hard work.
As a writer and entrepreneur, Scott H. Young notes that this is a problem because we associate being busy with being productive, but they are not the same thing. Therefore, when we spend all our time on busy work, we harbor the idea that we are working productively, while all the time we neglected the most important work.
While it can be difficult to get out of the loop, it opens up time for hard and important work.
Young suggests cutting back on your commitments to leave more room for larger projects. Newport also advocates doing less is better than thinking too hard.
But Young also suggests being disabled or unavailable on purpose. The more approachable and responsive you are, the easier it is for other people to clutter your life and consume your time with their priorities.
RescueTime CEO Robbie McDonell tried to drastically cut his social media activity because it was becoming overwhelming:
About a year ago, I got into a rut where I was completely bogged down in checking the news and social media. I had so many streams of information to keep track of that it was really exhausting to keep up to date. I was completely burnt out of it and decided to ditch most of that cold meat, cutting my time on social media by about 90%. I deleted everything from my phone and decided not to visit sites in my browser. The awkward feeling of being disconnected from everything was real, but it went away after a few days.
A year later, McDonell says the change was worth it:
Getting away from the noise I was going through was great. The best part is that the quality of my battery life has improved a lot. I’m more present, and “catching up” with friends is now usually a focused conversation, rather than running through a bunch of status updates.
It might sound overwhelming, but not having an account on every social network, dropping available in chat programs during business hours, or even not sharing an email address can provide huge amounts of non-stop time for real work. By making it harder for other people to contact you, you will ensure that only very important messages reach you, and you protect your time from hard work and lengthy requests.
Of course, then the problem arises: what to use as an excuse if you’re avoiding the hard work anyway …
It’s never easy to go against the tide, but doing what seems normal is doing ourselves a disservice. Our “normality” has turned into a bad habit of accepting all the new available technologies into our lives, no matter what value they really bring to us.
Taking the time to re-evaluate the tools we use and the way we spend our time can be eye-opening. And if we regularly evaluate our choices and conserve our time and attention, we can simply avoid repeating this trap.
How to Clear Digital Clutter and Focus Again | RescueTime Blog