2017, the year I began questioning the true value of the possessions I have in my life.
Back in December 2016 Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things by Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus, collectively known as The Minimalists, was released on Netflix. Minimalist design is something I admire and I’ve always been pretty organised so I figured I’d give it a watch. The minimalist lifestyle they teach is not one where you brutally throw away all your possessions and refuse to use technology, but one where you can justify to yourself that every possession you hold is adding value to your life.
This inspired a New Year’s resolution (cliché I know) to sort through the possessions I’ve accumulated over my 21 years on this planet; clothes, books, CDs etc that I had sat in boxes in cupboards awaiting that ‘one day I might need this again’. Doing this was not only therapeutic but granted me a clear vision of what was important in my life.
But I’m sure you’re not reading this to find out the details of how I parted ways with my angsty teenage CD collection which truth be told hasn’t gone anywhere other than Spotify. So I’ll make this a little more relevant to the digital life I live and breath.
With a clearer vision of what was important it soon became apparent how plugged into the unimportant I still was digitally. Maybe this was through fear or missing out if I didn’t check that notification right away or maybe just a cumulative effect of being a millennial. As many of us probably are, I’m a sucker for routinely checking my social accounts, so I began to question how much value knowing what that guy from school who I’ve probably not spoken to in 5 years was up to last night, so of course I purged my Facebook friends and Instagram/Twitter follows.
“Addition by subtraction.” – Joshua Fields Millburn
Doing this certainly sped up my routine refreshing but I was still aware I was mindlessly consuming from an infinite stream of information. Throughout my day, from moments after I wake up to moments before I fall asleep, I’m checking out some aesthetic buildings or tasty plants on Instagram, enjoying cute videos of pigs eating Cheerios on Facebook, witnessing the world fall apart on Twitter or watching a review on YouTube of a guitar pedal I don’t really need; and that’s just at home. At work I’m browsing Site Inspire for the latest industry trends, reading about current topics on Designer News and finding cool new solutions on Product Hunt to problems that arguably don’t already exist.
Working in the industry that I do and the occasional desire to function as a social human-being means that some of this does add value to my life, just not at such an extensive level. My latest solution to tackle distraction and improve my focus has been to disable push notifications for social apps (those likes will still be waiting for me when I open Instagram up, right?). This has also led me to realise things will probably be okay if I leave my phone out of arms length for longer than 5 minutes at a time.
Improved focus and removal from a haze of distraction allows me to be better at my job and have better interpersonal relationships. I can now step away and exist outside of the internet rather than living in constant admiration for the lives and work of others.
Another area I’m hot on minimising is the noise and clutter of my workflow. Being a developer working on a lot of different projects means that a lot of data passes through my Mac on a daily basis; files, emails, passwords, notes etc. But I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I just went and blindly deleted all of this, would I?
Going back to The Minimalists who wrote this blog post on a concept they call ‘20 Dollars, 20 Minutes’. To summarise, it’s a way of detaching yourself from those ‘just in case’ items, ones you might need in a hypothetical future. If something can be replaced for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes, get rid of it. I apply this methodology to the data generated by my workflow.
As many do, we use Dropbox for file storage here at Chaptr, so I can just sync and un-sync as and when I need to. Admittedly the assets for this blog post currently reside on my desktop whilst I’m drafting it, but I take great pride in saying that they’re the only files of this sort currently stored on my Mac and come the end of the day they’ll be in my trash folder. If I need them again this week I can get them back in under 20 minutes, probably more like 20 seconds actually. If they’re still there come Friday and I haven’t touched them they’ll be wiped from my Mac for good; I use an app from MacPaw called CleanMyMac for that.
All of our development projects are stored in Git, so I don’t need to store old projects locally, I can just pull them down again if I need them. We use LastPass to manage all of our passwords so I no longer have dozens of scraps of paper buried in my desk draws with hieroglyphics on them; besides this being a game changer for security. My browser bookmarks are organised in a folder structure comprised of roughly 5 tiers; possibly excessive but it works for me, I can easily find that piece of inspiration for a client project or that cool article one of our designers sent me without the need to trawl through masses of bookmarks without any recollection of their relevance.
As for emails, I can’t be as brutal as I am with social notifications and just turn them off. I’m an adult with responsibilities and a developer with websites to maintain after all. What I can do though is unsubscribe, rather than repeatedly deleting emails from the same company without reading them I’ll just unsubscribe. Polymail makes unsubscribing and reaching inbox zero a treat. Taking this approach means that 90% of the emails I now receive are important ones, or ones which add value to my day-to-day.
I try to keep my local development workflow as simple as possible whilst still allowing me to be productive and efficient.
– MAMP runs my local projects.
– Atom is my text editor of choice, I also have a couple of additional ‘packages’ installed, my main ones being Git-Plus, Emmet and WordPress-API.
– CodeKit optimises and compiles my projects, it also refreshes the browser as I work.
– Chrome’s Inspector is great and I’ve recently discovered the extension CSS Peeper to export assets and inspect colour pallets.
There’s a million extensions, apps and tools available that claim to improve productivity, maybe some will for you, but from my experience I’ve found that complicating things too much just increases the chances that something will break somewhere along the line; and that’s never good is it?
Hopefully you can justify to yourself that your time spent reading this post has been valuable and it has inspired and encouraged you to challenge yourself and be more conscious of what’s important. If it hasn’t, I’m sorry for adding to that haze of distraction I myself complained about. Perhaps just go watch that Netflix documentary.