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20 Tips to Simplify Your Digital and Online Life

Digital information is overwhelming. If you don’t simplify your digital life, it will take over your real life. This article contains 20 tips to simplify your digital life.

1. Use only two email accounts. How many email accounts do you have? If the answer is greater than two, you have some work to do. You just need one personal email, and one work email. There are folks who have an email address for family, an email address for close friends, an email address for college friends, an email address for online friends, etc. They end-up spending lot of time checking these constantly. Pick only one personal email address, notify your friends and family that you’ll be using only that address, and just give-up rest of your personal email addresses.

Check emails only once per day. Depending on the nature of your work, you might have to check your work emails frequently. However, there is absolutely no reason to check your personal emails more than once per day. Change your current habit and workflow, so that you check your personal emails only once per day, preferably at the end of the day before you go to bed. This also means that you should stop checking personal emails on your phone. Uninstall unnecessary software. Uninstall all the software from your laptop that you don’t use. The less software you have the better it is. Some of the software runs in the background even when you are not using it, which takes away valuable CPU and memory resource from the laptop. So, keep only the software you use, and uninstall the rest. Cloud is your friend. Don’t use your local hard drive to store your documents. Use cloud based solutions. For personal documents, use Google Docs and Dropbox. Once you consistently use Google Docs for all your document needs, you can quickly access it from anywhere, and you don’t need to be tied-up to your laptop all the times. Use cellphone only for calls. Now-a-days everybody is on their phones all the times texting, checking emails, IMing, tweeting, watching videos, etc. Keep in mind that there is a real life out there with real people. Step outside your digital work, and enjoy the nature, enjoy the interaction with your family and friends. Using cellphone only for calls might be very hard to do for lot of you. But, give this a try for one week, and see the huge difference it makes in your life. Consolidate your social media acccounts. Do you have an account in every possible social media websites that you came across? Social media websites consume your time. They are like drugs. Once you are addicted, it is very hard to give-up, and they take-up all your time and energy. If you are still compelled to use social media websites for whatever reasons, just pick only one of your favorite site, and spend no more than few minutes per day on it. Have a framework to execute projects. You need a single system or workflow to stay organized. UseGetting Things Done (GTD) to get your projects organized, and execute all your tasks. You should be getting things done on an on-going basis, and GTD is an excellent framework to help you with that. Use keyboard shortcuts. Take some time to learn the keyboard shortcuts of the applications that you use frequently. Using keyboard shortcuts will increase your productivity dramatically. Cleanup your browser. Is your browser cluttered with several plugins, add-ons and toolbars? Keep only the plugins/add-ons that you use frequently, and uninstall the rest. If you have not used a plugin in the last couple of months, you probably don’t need that, just uninstall it. Limit your incoming digital information. Do you need to know anytime someone updates their linkedin profile, follows you on twitter, posts a message on your facebook wall, uploads a picture in picasa, etc? Make sure to adjust your profile setting in all those websites so that it doesn’t send you emails anytime some activity happens. If your friends keeps forwarding you funny emails, links to funny videos, or some chain emails, politely tell them that you are not interested in those emails, and request them to stop sending those emails to you. If you are reading news from tons of online sources, pick only one realiable news source and read your news from there. Don’t use instant messenger. While you are at work, would you have all your friends be sitting next to you, and disturb you from getting things done? Probably not. If that is the case, why do you have your IM turned on and allow your friends to disturb you while you are trying to get things done? If your family and friends needs to get hold of you immediately, they can always call you in your cellphone. Turning off IM when you are focussing to get things done is a good start, but you should really consider stop using IM all together. Clear your computer desktop. You really don’t need all those application shortcuts on your desktop. Also, lot of people use their desktop as a temp area to store documents. You should keep your desktop clean. Once you delete all those shortcuts from your desktop, learn to use keyboard shortcuts to launch applications. Setup a simple wallpaper p_w_picpath on your desktop that motivates you. Use password manager. You might have created yourself an account on lot of websites. Don’t give the same username and password on all those websites. Create unique strong password for every website, and usepassword manager software (this one works on Windows, Linux and Mac) to organize all those online account informations. Use single calendar. Having multiple calendars to schedule all your appointments can get very confusing and cause all kinds of issues. Use only one calendar to schedule your appointments. Disconnect from digital world one day a week. You really don’t need to be connected to digital world all the times. Saturday is a good day to disconnect from the digital world and spend time with nature, friends and family. Don’t check your emails, browse the internet, watch TV, etc, at least one day in a week. This will definitely make a huge difference in the quality of your life. Try it and see the results yourself. Delete your old documents. Do a massive purge of all your digital items. Do you really need all those documents and software from the project that you worked on several years ago? Probably not. If you have not used a document in the last six months, just delete it from your system. If you have hard time deleting an old document, and you are afriad that you might need it in the future, at least backup all those documents to an external hard drive, or DVD, and delete it from your system. If you download any software from the internet, delete the original download file after you install the software. The download file are huge, and it takes up unnecessary space on your hard disk. If you need it later, you can always download it from the internet again. Schedule purging routine. Schedule a digital purging routine (atleast once every 6 months) in your calendar to clean up all your old digital items from your system. Don’t organize file and folders. Organizing your digital documents in multiple folder structures is a waste of time and is not really required. Install google desktop on your laptop, which will quickly search for the documents you are looking for, even faster than your custom organized folders. Probably you can create couple of high level folders under your home directory, and dump all your files into those folders without creating multiple sub directories. When you want to retrieve a document from those foldres, use google desktop to locate it, and open it. Keep your email inbox clean. Your email inbox is not the place to store all read emails. Once you’ve read the email, archive it immediately. When you archive it, the email is still there, but it is stored in the archive folder. If your email software doesn’t have the archive functionality, create a folder called ‘archive’ and move all the read emails into it. Your email inbox should contain only unread new emails. Batch process your digital chores. You don’t go for grocery shopping anytime you think of buying a single item. You combine several items and try to do your groceries once a week. Use the same concept for all your digital chores. Set aside 1 hour every week to do all your digital chores. This might include paying your bills online, uploading pictures and videos, emailing your friends, backing up your laptop, etc.