Minimalism

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture, wherein the subject is reduced to its necessary elements.

I have always tried to make minimalism my personal ethos, as it continuously brings me peace whenever I can reduce my life to the necessities. Further, where items are required, they must be organized and tidy.

Physical Items

The key to minimalism in my physical life revolves around a focused mindset and constant curation of the items in my life. All items should serve a purpose. Those that do not serve a purpose should be removed.

While I don't think every item needs to "bring you joy", each item should have a use. The difficult part is when the use case for an item is purely emotional, such as items that serve no purpose other than nostalgia. E.g., a carnival prize you won as child during your only visit ever to a carnival.

My personal rule is that if an item is purely for emotional benefit, it must bring enough happiness to overrule and discomfort I have with the extra item lying around.

Digital Garden

For most people, the digital world is a place where you can hoard as much as possible with no restraint, as these items don't hold physical space in your home. I disagree. Your digital life should be a garden, carefully curated for your needs.

Treat your digital world, such as your mobile phone, computers, social media, etc. as a representative form of art about yourself. Don't let things become overgrown or age with disuse.

Personally, I perform the following curation activities constantly to ensure that my digital garden is maintained and beneficial:

Fonts, color schemes, and other design elements should be functional (e.g., accessibility) and non-distracting. Backgrounds should not distract from the purpose of the device. Fonts should be legible and consistent in all situations.
Applications on my devices must serve a current purpose. If I will not use an application within days, it should be removed from the device. It can be reinstalled later, if needed.
Notifications should be reduced to an absolute minimum. When in doubt, test the notifications for a set period (1 day or 1 week) and decide if they are critical. If a notification does not require immediate attention (emergencies), they should be disabled completely or muted, if disabling is not possible.
- Check in on my apps manually, don't give them permission to steal my attention.
Curate my notifications and messages. When I do need to check an app's notifications, I am sure to read each one and mark it as read. If a notification becomes a task, I move that task to my personal task/to-do tracker instead of leaving it as unread.
On desktop machines, I create template layouts to ensure that my screen space is fully functional and I don't need to waste time moving windows around. I keep these templates 100% functional and only keep applications open if they're currently in use.
- Personally, I prefer to completely shut down devices each night and start fresh each morning to ensure no tasks are pushed off to the next day.
With file storage (cloud or local), I used a consistent file directory structure across devices to ensure time is not wasted when switching devices. I also use a few techniques to ensure my files are tidy:
- ISO 8601 time format (YYYY-MM-DD) is used for all files and machines. If time is important to a file, it should be hard coded into the filename or at the top of the file contents.
- Files should be categorized based on importance or retention. Here's a simple set of categories: permanent, limited time, short-term.
- File names should be fully descriptive to remove guesswork when traversing directories.