Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. By clearing the clutter from life’s path, we can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution.

The idea of minimalism is simple. Only twenty percent of the things we own and the people we're acquainted with add the eighty percent value in our lives. The rest eighty percent tend to take more from us than give to us. The rest eighty percent may take our money, our time, our attention, our emotional resources, our energy while not giving back enough value to justify it. In fact, many of these enhance our anxiety, depreciate our health and keep us from doing meaningful work.

This is the clutter.

By owning things and being acquainted with people and ideas that clutter our lives, like email, tricks us into believing that we are making progress in our lives while only managing to keep us busy. This is popularly known as 'busywork' - work that takes up our time but adds little to no value to what we ought to be doing.

While minimalism is a lifestyle movement around being deliberate about the things we own and the people and ideas and habits that we associate with, digital minimalism is an important sub aspect of this movement.

The amount of time we spend in front of a screen is steadily increasing, and there are millions of apps and websites that vie for our limited attention. Here too, there are apps and websites that add a lot of value while there are many others that just soak our time and attention and give us nothing (maybe lousy ads) in return.

Digital minimalism is about making a deliberate choice when it comes to our screen time and picking only things that add value to us.

For me, this means,
less social media and more blogging
less email and more deep work
less news and more informative articles
less (zero) notifications and more airplane mode
less texting and more writing
less Youtube/Netflix and more documentaries/TEDTalks.

If you receive responses from me on Messenger and WhatsApp only on specific times of the day (and not immediately), it is not because I'm ignoring you but because these are the only times I'm notified of incoming messages.

Digital minimalism is not about spending less time in front of the screen. It is only about spending the time we already do more deliberately.

Try it.