We consume a lot of information, every single day
If I were you, I would love to know if the blog I’m reading is written by a honest guy. I would expect that honesty is one of his key traits. That is why, for a matter of value, transparency and credibility, today I want to make public the figures of my actual and real digital life.
Where I’m coming from
During the last few years I have always spent my digital life with a big amount of clutter.
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I did never dare to delete old messages of my inbox;
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I didn’t care about the amount of never-ending information that constantly kept growing in my RSS reader.
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I never kept my subscriptions under control.
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I also enjoyed loosing lots of time, surfing the net to know something more.
At that time, there was so much clutter laying around in my digital life.
Where I’ve come to
I created this blog as a reminder to be deeply honest with myself. So, in part, it helped me taking responsibility for the clutter I had built in my life, and it was the starting point to make things better and start decluttering.
I think that the world could be a better place if everyone would be honest with himself and with others.
Sharing my points of view enabled me to be more honest with myself, about what I want out of life. I’m happy to be where I am, because I understand the meaning of having a wonderful life. I feel freed from the clutter of a mediocre life. This is what I did to start my digital cleaning process: I deleted
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my RSS feeds
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the useless files I kept in my hard disk
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the useless clutter I had in my mind and in my experience of a teenager
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Everything that “seemed” to be true, what I had been taught in school.
Things have changed now, and I’m glad they did.
Because today, this is what my digital life looks like:
Average time checking inbox: 15 minutes /day
Email Subscriptions: 7
Social Networks: 1 (Twitter)
Blogs: the one you are reading!
Computers: 1
I’m also free from the cloud. I keep nothing personal stored online, except my public online stuff (blog, talks’ slides and podcasts, talks recordings).
I have been trying so many (new) things during the last months, both in computing hacks and productivity enhancing ideas. I have found Linux to be my perfect mate in computing; I am a proud Ubuntu Linux user and I will probably keep Linux running on my netbook for a long, long time.
I wanted to be a “minimalist” in my daily computing, but there is a fine line between minimalism and impracticality. Most of the time, minimalism simply means narrowing the effort’s range, so to focus better in a single direction. To me, it’s a great way of life, because it removes so much useless noise from our existence. The most important thing I learned during my voyage into a new life is that all I need to know and cherish is myself: who and what I am.
Yesterday I was in search of what’s better.
Today I finally found what it means to be free.
I will keep myself on this path.
The next step I’m taking
It is really easy to get rid of something digital. We can to that by pressing a button. No remorse, no nothing. As I write this, I feel that I can publicly announce the next step I’m taking. Even if I have less subscriptions to tame, the super sized portions of information I consume each day still keeps making me fatter and fatter. I need to put this to a drastic end, so to focus on something more important than the web.
This is what I will do for every week, starting from now: (I will let you know about it in next week’s post) every time I feel like creating new content, reading or simply decluttering my digital life, I will cut the Internet off my life.
Less connected: More Likely to live
So simple. Get rid of distractions.
It’s time to get down to business.