New Year Special Issue : Actionable Ideas to Digital Minimalism

This is a long one, but I think at least one thing in here will help you make a positive change in your life

Introduction

There is nothing special about the first of January. It’s simply an arbitrary cut off point in the continuous stream of days that makes up our lives. However, we tend to make them special by resolving to do certain things. Statistics indicate that the number of people picking up gym memberships rises during this time of the year. But then, you know what happens soon after this uptick – we move back to our old, comfortable ways. Over the course of the past few months, I have been closely observing myself and my students to understand the things that keep us from our ideal, productive selves.  The one overwhelming phenomenon I’ve identified that stares us down our faces and keeps us from getting work done – technology.

Let me give you a minute.

Pick up your phones and check out the digital wellness feature (both iOS and Android have the feature). Look at how many hours you spend staring at your phone every day.

For me, this is about 3 hours on average. But then, there are days in which I use my phone for nearly 4 hours.

This is just part of the equation. In addition to this, we also have screen time from tablets and computers. For me, that is about 7 hours a day.

In total, this is about 11 hours in front of gadgets, and then, we also have the bright LCD projectors in our classes that we live with.

With this data, I think it's pretty safe to assume that we probably spend anywhere between 10 and 12 hours in front of a screen every single day.

This hurts us. We know that, but very often we are helpless. Marketers have been carefully studying human behavior and have slowly and steadily been engaging us with content through the internet. Just 30 years ago, this was not the case. This is possibly the number one reason we do not focus as much as the generation before us. All of us would agree that a change in this is necessary. The fact that the new year just began is possibly an excuse to set in motion some of these changes. However, any sort of change we try to implement often leads only to incremental and not comprehensive improvements in the quality of life we are leading. I do not want to argue that incremental change is not good, but then, incremental changes will have to add up over time for anyone to see perceptible benefits.

Therefore, I thought maybe I can come up with a list of ideas that you can follow today to save at least an hour or so every day. If that hour helps you focus on the things that matter to you, family, education, hobbies, or anything else, I would be happy.

Over the next few pages, I shall propose a system that I think will make a difference. Some of these ideas, I have learnt from different places. I have also been following some of them for some time now, and have felt the benefit of using them. Some others, I have not used in the past, but am planning to start using from today. Like I always tell in class, desperate times call for desperate measures. These are some of the desperate measures that you may want to consider. (Please note that the following measures are stated in no particular order. You may pick and choose any combination of the measures or skip them entirely)

Measure #1 : Mobile phone fixes

Mobile phones are designed to give you the best possible user experience given the cost constraints. Very often, it is the large colorful AMOLED screens that refresh at 60-120 Hz that help you stay distracted. The extending battery lives, 4G connectivity and other bells and whistles simply augment the immersive experiences that they provide. Apps today can take advantage of these features and provide you with a stream of content that is engaging, and to some extent, addictive. Marketing professors Kaitlin Woolley and Marissa Sharif argue that “These platforms are designed to trap viewers in a social media rabbit hole: They offer bite-sized content that makes it easy to quickly consume several videos or posts in a row, they often automatically suggest similar content, and many of them even automatically start playing similar videos, reducing the potential for interruptions. While presenting users with engaging content isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the accessibility of this media is exactly what makes it so hard for users to break free from the rabbit hole and get back to whatever they were working on.” (You can read more about this here). Therefore, it may be a prudent strategy to uninstall these apps entirely and work on overcoming the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

Uninstalling your phones is not going to be sufficient. The other key step you have to take in your mobile phone is to stop your mobile phone from automatically throwing notifications at you. You can find out the apps that give you the most notifications and ‘turn off notifications’ from them.

After this, turn your phone to silent mode for good. You should never be able to hear your phone ring, ever. If you get a missed call, you call back - or even better, choose to text. I am personally following a system where I check the phone once every 2 hours (even hours). If there are any calls that I missed, I call back.

Another useful step that I am personally benefiting from disabling email access on my phone. Email is serious business, it may be best to do it from the computer. We’ll discuss how to improve email processing in the next section. (The same holds true for Whatsapp too (that’s my number one time waster at the moment - start using whatsapp web on your computers, you can get through so much more very quickly)

Measure #2 : Installing a system to process email

If you cannot reply to an email immediately, then there are only four other logical things you do with emails.

1. Mark your calendar
2. Add something to your ‘to do’ list
3. Make a note of it in a note taking app
4. Read it later/ignore perpetually

A good idea to start would be to get Evernote (plain cross platform note taking) and Todoist (good to do list manager). There can be other choices, but these are the ones I preferred, and I’ll explain why - they can be made to work together using an automation app called IFTTT (If this then that).

IFTTT allows apps to talk to each other. One interesting thing you could do is to make every todoist task get appended to a single evernote page. This way, your todo list is always available to you. Todoist has a calendar integration feature that lets you automatically add all your tasks to your calendar automatically, yes, the same calendar where you are inputting all your activities.

In addition to the notes syncing, you can also use IFTTT on your phone to do the following tasks that can prove to be useful in the future.

1. Log all calls that you receive/make on your phone. This will help you get the data that you need to improve your system later
2. Log all SMSes you receive - this will help you track where you get the most spam from and arrest it later

Now let’s focus on improving the speed with which you process emails.

The number one time waster when processing email is your mouse. In fact, the mouse is the number one time waster when you are on your computer. It is very important for anyone to learn shortcuts, especially when doing repeated things.

There are two key shortcuts that help when working with email (this works with the online Gmail client, but you can search around for similar solutions for other clients).

First, enable keyboard shortcuts on Gmail. You can do that by:

1. Going to gmail on your web browser
2. Clicking on Settings. See all settings.
3. Click Settings.
4. Scroll down to the "Keyboard shortcuts" section.
5. Select Keyboard shortcuts on.
6. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.

There are many shortcuts that google provides you with, and it can sometimes be overwhelming to remember. However, you will not have to remember everything. There are just a few most used shortcuts that you can remember.

1. Archive - e
2. Label - l
3. Reply - r
4. Reply all - a
5. Send - Command + Enter (or Ctrl + Enter)

Google allows you to reconfigure these keys in case you want to. But the defaults are pretty ok.

After this, you are going to have to enable ‘auto advance’ in your gmail.

You can do that by:

1. Going to settings Settings
2. Click ‘See all settings’.
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Select the Enable radio button across the Auto-advance feature.
5. Scroll down and hit Save Changes.

You then save changes, and refresh. Then go to the settings once more, and select “Go to the next (newer) conversation”.

Together, the keyboard shortcuts and auto-advance feature pack a powerful punch. Now all you have to do is to go to the oldest email you want to begin with, read it, reply or do one of the four other things, and press ‘e’. In case you want to label it, use ‘l’. After you archive one email, you automatically go to the next (newer) one. Repeat the process until your inbox gets empty.

In this way, you can process your email in a fraction of the time. Coupled with the fact that you will no longer be using the phone to reply to emails, this will offer you blazing fast email processing. Now you will start seeing perceptible differences in the way you work.

Measure #3 : Blocking out unwanted sites

Another feature that you can use in most modern day operating systems is the ability to block sites entirely. This will require you to do some level of coding. Here is some help.

On Mac OS, you can block sites that you want to avoid by

Open Terminal and type the following command

sudo pico /etc/hosts

1. Press Enter and enter your administrator password when prompted. This will open the "hosts" file in Nano.

Scroll to the bottom of the file and add the following line:

127.0.0.1 www.example.com

1. Replace "www.example.com" with the website you want to block. You can add multiple websites by putting each one on its own line.
2. Press Ctrl + O to save the changes, then press Enter to confirm the file name.
3. Press Ctrl + X to exit Nano.

There are more detailed instructions present here.

For windows, you can

1. Open the Command Prompt by pressing the Windows key + R, typing "cmd" into the Run window, and pressing Enter.

Type the following command and press Enter:

ipconfig /flushdns

This command clears the DNS cache on your computer, which may be necessary for the changes you're about to make to take effect.

Type the following command and press Enter:

route add example.com mask 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1

Replace "example.com" with the website you want to block. This command adds a route to the network routing table that redirects all traffic to the website to the loopback IP address (127.0.0.1), which is the local host.

Note: Some websites may use multiple IP addresses, in which case you may need to add a route for each IP address. You can use the "nslookup" command to get the IP addresses for a website. For example: "nslookup example.com"

There are more detailed instructions found here. just in case you want some more assistance.

Both of these limits are fully reversible, but then, do not try and figure out how to do it. It’s best to block some sites and stay away from them for life.

There is just one more thing. You may also benefit from setting up an adblocker that disables ads. Remember those heavily interrupting ads we get on Youtube, you can completely avoid them on computers by installing adblockers on your browser. I personally use adblock. It is free and you can get it from here. But then, there are many other free alternatives that you can look for and choose one that works for you. Every ad you do not watch is about 10 seconds saved. Trust me, these seconds add up really really fast.

Measure #4: Get physical

I never thought I’d be saying this. But here it goes, invest in a good wallet and make it a habit to hold cash in it. Stop using GPay. The convenience of paying through your phone is great, but over the last few years, this convenience has basically made me ditch my wallet. It was only after I moved out of campus that I realized how much I need my identification cards, credit cards, and cash from time to time. Additionally the fact that you have your wallet on your person does help people reach out to your loved ones in case something bad happens. Also, get a watch and wear it regularly. Just make sure it's not one of those smart watches that keeps throwing notifications at you all the time.

Concluding remarks

I don’t have much to say in the form of a conclusion. Try these interventions out and see if they work for you. I hope some of these suggestions do help you out and make your life a little bit clutter free. Personally, I am worried about the high incidence of panic attacks, anxiety, and depression amongst young students. I thought this bit of information was essential to share. I’m going to close with a quote from a friend, “we all have to learn to do the bare minimum in this highly distractible world”. I hope the last few pages help you in that learning process.

All the best kids!

Have a happy, productive, and anxiety free new year ahead!