Read This 5: Marie Kondo for our Digital Spaces
I had an epiphany this week that lead to the theme for this week's edition of Read This:
I should treat Slack the same way I treat my email: keep the app closed most of the time and only check it a few times per day.
We're going on 10 weeks of being remote and maybe it'll end soon, maybe it wont. Regardless, I went into this experience thinking I'd spend a lot more time reading on the couch and instead have spent a lot more time at my desk working, reading twitter, or browsing the internet. It seems like most people are in the same boat here.
Marie Kondo for our Digital Spaces
So this week, our topic is digital minimalism. The book recommendations below are about decluttering your digital life and setting good boundaries with technology, as if Marie Kondo were guiding you through it.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Digital minimalism doesn't mean you have to close all your browser tabs! Maybe just lay them all out on your desktop and go through them one at a time, asking if they bring you joy. If the answer is yes, then tuck it away somewhere safe. If the answer is no, then close the sh*t out of it. As Essentialism would guide you to do, keep the tabs that are essential.
That is the premise of Essentialism: if you feel like you have to do everything, you'll end up doing nothing. So if you want to focus on the things that are important to you, then this is your manifesto.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
If Essentialism is the manifesto, then Digital Minimalism is the how-to guide. The book is filled with concrete ideas on how to implement digital minimalism and will give you an idea of what life looks like on the other side of digital decluttering.
Maybe the best reason to buy it is the thirty-day digital decluttering exercise, meant to take you through the ideas presented in the book and actually implement them in your life. In that way, it really is digital equivalent to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
You may know of Eyal from his book Hooked, which is the handbook for designing habit-forming and addictive apps. The subtitle to Hooked is literally "How to design habit-forming apps." Hooked is the reason why you can sit down for a few minutes to check Instagram and then get an alert from your phone a few minutes later that your battery is about to die, only it's actually a few months later and you have no idea what just happened with your life. Did I have this beard before I opened Instagram?
Anyway, Indistractable may be Eyal's form of repentance. It's a book about how to break away from habit-forming applications. The advice is useful and practical. While some minimalists tell you to throw away everything you own except some arbitrary number of things, effective minimalism (digital or not) is really about reducing and setting boundaries. Digital Minimalism will help you reduce; Indistractable will help you set boundaries.
Conclusion
These books will have to do for now, until the day that Marie Kondo turns to organizing digital spaces (iKondo?).
When decluttering your physical spaces, you shouldn't feel like you have to throw everything away. Similarly, with your digital life, you shouldn't feel like you have to delete all the apps from your phone. We all kind of know how well abstinence like that works for people. So instead of trying to abstain, let's talk about when it's okay, how to be safe, and how to protect ourselves emotionally, physically, and mentally from people, err, uh, technology that doesn't respect our boundaries. These are the books to help you do that.
Happy reading,
Zakk
P.s. I just noticed that all of these links go to the paperback version of the book. That's odd.