On the thought of digital minimalism

I've started the minimalism project, which currently is still in the theoretical realm as I'm taking stock of my worldly posessions.

The other bit is being on a digital minimalism, which is a bit weird considering I do actually work on the internet.

The entire reason though, and this might be something that other people might have noticed, is that social media takes away a lot of focus and attention from What We Should Be Doing, be it interacting with the truly important people in our lives, doing our work instead of being on Facebook or reading that book that's been on the shelf for a while.

I'm curious whether I can do it or not. For this reason I'm moving away from Facebook, and minimising the people I follow on Twitter (it's almost stupid that I've scrolled back 4 pages, and it's still 1 hour in the past. What do people DO who follow 10k+ people if I struggle with 629?).

In any case, the point is to reduce noise. Social media is noise. Unnecessary Buzzfeed / Mashable / TechCrunch articles are noise. My friends' babies, adorable though they may be, are noise.

Steps

• moving away from Facebook as much as possible, replacing communication channels with the people involved to something else
• cutting down on the people I follow, so less, but more relevant things come up on my list
• making Twitter my main avenue of communication with new people. To me it is replacing email
• unsubscribing from a TON of email lists. Seriously, I don't need that much (nor do you)
• actually doing valuable work in the time I freed up

If you've done something similar, I'd love to hear your experiences.

Here's the article that kicked me in the behind to start implementing this: Getting My Brain Back - TechCrunch

Here's another article by someone who's done it already. Turns out I am hoping to achieve the same things he'd already experienced: Two Weeks Without Facebook - Jerad Hill.

Previously: MacBook Pro won over MacBook Air