With the Barcamp, the Presence Week of the Master Content Strategy came to a brilliant end. One of the presentations was held by our colleagues Shkendie and Freya, who talked about “how to simplify your digital life”. The idea is based on the book “Digital Minimalism, choosing a focused Life in a Noisy World” by the computer scientist Cal Newport and lets us rethink and reevaluate our digital behavior.
According to recent data, the average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone each day. And 1 in 5 smartphone users spends upwards of 4.5 hours on average on their phones every day. The average amount of time spent on social media worldwide is set to hit 147 minutes, or two hours and 27 minutes, a day in 2022. Just a few really want to spend so much time on their mobile, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. This irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding their attention autonomy.
Ride on an emotional rollercoaster
Social media and other digital services are distracting us and focus is becoming harder. Social media can be distracting and empowering. Our phones are equally annoying interruptions and powerful tools for navigating the world. E-mails and chats can be both stressful and productive.
Doubtlessly, digital consumption also has an impact on their psychological well-being; Smartphone addiction is related to depression, eating disorders, loneliness, and anxiety. Always checking for new text messages and emails. It’s a bit like junk food, we know it’s unhealthy, but it’s become a habit. People don’t succumb to screens because they are lazy. Everybody is affected by this. The most hardworking even who are used to pursuing hard goals or the most devoted parent.
Can we liberate ourselves from the shackles of email, social networks, smartphones, and screens?
What exactly does digital minimalism mean?
Digital minimalism is based on the understanding that our relationship with our apps, tools, and phones is nuanced and deserves more attention than we give it.
“Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time and a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else” (Cal Newport)
It means whittling down the technology you use and becoming more conscious of the fact that using this website, app, or social media platform supports what you value. It is about maximizing purpose while reducing the cost of time and energy. Because how you use your apps and tools can bring you value or be a frustrating distraction.
We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.
3 principles of Digital minimalism
Principle #1: Clutter is costly
Digital minimalism recognizes that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swap the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.
Press your personal reset button
In the digital declutter process, take yourself a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life and try to find and rediscover activities that are meaningful to you. At the end of your break, reinstall optional digital services and determine the value that adds to your life and how exactly you will use it.
Principle #2: Optimization is important
Digital minimalism believes that deciding whether a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use technology.
Principle #3 Intentionality is satisfying
Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more international about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
How you use your apps and tools can bring you value or be a frustrating distraction. And finding a balance between the negative and positive aspects of technology is a delicate balancing act that digital minimalism tries to solve.
Spending time alone is crucial for helping us process emotions. Reflecting on relationships and giving the brain some calm and clarity are also essential to general mental health and well-being.
What can we as content strategists take from these insights?
When people consider specific tools or behaviors in their digital lives, they tend to focus only on the value each produces. Having in mind that the usage of digital devices and social media is increasing and that more and more people are overloaded by information and feel exhausted, we always have to ask ourselves, does the content add value to our users? What can we attribute to more put out more value into the world?