- All right, guys, so this is a video
that I've been putting off for way too long (laughs)
because as mindful as I am about my media consumption,
I'm a devout follower of the path of least resistance,
and unless a problem becomes so big
that I just can't ignore it,
I'm just gonna keep doing the same thing,
and I imagine that maybe you guys have
a similar approach to technology.
I've got junk folders and miscellaneous files
all over my computers,
and useless apps that have filled up my phone.
Just like counters that clutter with random things,
knick-knacks, and recycling,
unless you have a system for where things go,
they'll continue to pile up.
So I finally decided to take that extra step
and declutter my digital life.
Over the past week, as I've taken stock of everything,
I've found a lot of room for improvement,
and I wanted to share some of the things
that I've discovered through that process.
Now, when people talk about digital minimalism,
they're usually talking about two different things.
(jazzy music) One, how we can create
an approach for being more mindful
with how we use our technology.
If that's what you're looking for,
I suggest you check out my video,
"Four Rules for Digital Minimalism."
There are a lot of really great tips in there.
But I want to talk about the second thing,
which is going more into the tactical approach
and talking about the exact apps, plugins, and services
that have helped me untangle my digital life.
So this is my guide to digital minimalism in 2020.
It is for sure going to change in the future,
and it's also for me, so this might not work for you.
It might just give you some inspiration and some ideas
for how to organize your own digital life.
Of course, I am open to suggestions, so if you guys
want to start a conversation down in the comments,
definitely let me know what has helped you
in terms of digital minimalism.
With all that said, let's get right into it.
(jazzy music)
All right, so I have four devices in total.
One laptop, one desktop,
an iPhone, and an iPad.
My 2015 MacBook Pro is keeping up well.
I get the most use out of this computer
than any other device.
I use it for writing, emailing, all my business stuff.
I also use it to watch movies in bed.
I have a 2017 MacPro trash can.
I use this for all my video editing.
My editor, Oscar, uses the iMac Pro,
which is a beast, and will likely be what I upgrade to next.
The new Mac Pro just seems a little bit overkill
and too expensive at this point.
I have an iPhone XS
that I got at the beginning of last year.
I use it to communicate with my team,
message with you guys on Instagram,
as well as send quick picks.
I'm sorry, um, dick pics.
(jazzy music) I have an iPad
that's mostly used for entertainment while I travel,
but I also use it to access Notes
while I'm working on videos.
So I have these four devices
that I need to be able to keep in sync at all times
because I'm constantly going from one to the other,
sharing notes and documents,
and I needed to make sure
that the system wouldn't slow me down,
that things were instant.
The moment that I changed something on my phone,
I could see it on my computer.
This is a common need for most people,
but surprisingly, there are a lot of apps
that are just kind of slow and buggy
and don't really work the right way,
so that was definitely something
that I looked at over this past week
as I started to find the right solution to my problems.
All right, so this is my desktop here.
As you can see, it is very clean. (laughs)
There is absolutely nothing on it.
There will at times be
like anywhere from five to 10 items.
I really like the Stacks feature with Apple now.
So basically what that does
is just combine screenshots, images, PDFs,
into essentially what looks like a folder on the desktop.
This is definitely something that I need to share
with Natalie like immediately.
Let's take a look at some of the shortcuts that I use,
up top, here.
So this is just QuickTime, which is what I'm using
to screen capture everything that I'm recording right now.
This is Dashlane, which is just quick access
to all my passwords.
Adobe, here.
I don't use Adobe Cloud,
but I do use the apps that are built into it.
This is my Google Drive quick link.
I'll talk about that more a little bit later.
I've got my Bluetooth, my Wi-Fi, my audio.
All this stuff is pretty basic.
I find myself using them very often,
so I just keep a quick access of them at the top bar, there.
Then, in my dock, I have it pretty clean,
just with my most useful apps.
Final Cut Pro for when I'm editing on the road.
I've got Google Chrome, Spotify,
my Notes app where I do most of my note taking.
I'll talk about that later, as well.
Slack, and these are just
the recent documents that I've used.
If it's not something that I use on a weekly basis,
I do not keep it as one of my shortcuts,
just to make sure it's nice and clean and organized,
and I think it's just really important
to think through these things,
just to kind of make your system as efficient as possible.
So let's go to Google Chrome.
You can see I've got quick access
to my calendar, Google Drive.
This is my TeuxDeux app.
The one interesting thing is this link here.
It actually doesn't take me to my inbox.
This takes me to a Compose Email form.
So this is for when I'm scheduling email,
say once or twice a day.
I don't want to have to go into my inbox,
but I want to finish up a task
and I want to move the needle on a project.
Let's say I want to send a video
to one of my producers or one of my filmmaking partners.
Now I don't have to go into my inbox,
getting distracted with other people's priorities.
I can just move along to the next item on my list.
This has been hugely helpful for me.
The link for it, it's a little bit tricky
and it took me a little bit of time
to figure out how to do this.
So what I'm gonna do is,
I'll provide a link in the description.
As long as you're logged into Gmail on your end,
you'll be able to just simply copy and paste that
as a bookmark for yourself,
and you'll be able to use it.
One thing that I'll mention is that,
for everything that I reference in this video,
as well as in future videos,
I'm going to leave links in the description below.
This is something new that I'm doing.
I want to make it as easy as possible for you guys
to get the references, the books,
the things that I mention.
Maybe it's past projects I'm talking about.
All that's gonna be in the description
in every video from here on out, so you're welcome.
I have connected my phone to my MacBook Pro
via the Messages app,
but I disabled the notifications.
There are times when I want to get to a message quickly
or access a photo that I need on my desktop,
this just makes it easier and reduces some friction.
I will say that it is vital for me to turn off notifications
for everything on my computer and my desktop,
so when it comes to the Messages app, FaceTime,
anything like that, I turn off all notifications.
I can access this stuff if I want,
but I don't get interrupted from my work.
Another messaging app I use is Slack,
and I use it for a couple different reasons.
The main reason why I initially started using it
was to communicate with my team.
I now have two employees that I work with,
and so getting straight on the projects we're working on
and making sure there's different channels
to communicate through,
and not just having it be in the black hole of email
has been super helpful.
The other reason why I'm using Slack
is because we just started an Inner Circle
for our Patreon members,
which is definitely a shameless plug,
but for those people who are contributing
at the Exclusive Videos tier,
we wanted to be able to create this community experience
where people can help each other work towards their goals,
whether they're building habits,
trying to figure out ways to improve productivity.
For me, what I'm trying to do more in the future
is create more of like a tight-knit community
of people who can help support each other,
because we all need a little bit of help.
Again, with Slack, I disable notifications on my computers,
and I only have notifications come through on my phone.
I set up Do Not Disturb on my phone
from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m.,
so I'll only receive push notifications while I'm working.
And I usually keep my phone flipped over
when I'm editing or writing,
just to make sure I don't get distracted.
Now, before I go any further,
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Thank you, Squarespace. So I think one of the biggest things
that I had to figure out through this whole process
was cloud storage,
and when I really took (laughs) an assessment
of my cloud storage accounts,
it was completely embarrassing.
So I had two Google Drive accounts,
two Dropbox accounts,
I had a WeTransfer account and an iCloud account,
and I'm pretty sure I had
an Adobe Creative (laughs) Cloud account
for storing files, as well.
It was just entirely too much.
I just kept getting these notifications
that would tell me like, "Hey,"
like, "You're over on your storage limit, upgrade now,"
and just me being lazy,
and again, just following that path of least resistance,
I was like, "Ah, I'm just,"
like, "It's fine, I'll figure it out next month,"
and then I never did, and now I did,
and it feels really good to actually have a solution.
After some research, I decided to choose Google Drive.
Since I already use Google Docs,
spreadsheets, calendar, and email,
it just made sense
to keep everything in that same ecosystem.
Google Drive has improved a ton in the past couple years,
and I'm really happy with them.
So I have a Google Drive folder
here on my computer that syncs online,
so any changes that I make within these files and folders
will be changed online.
It's where I store documents,
financial information, media.
This is for my wedding.
Anything that I need access to across all my devices.
I've used selective sync on files and folders
so it doesn't eat up too much storage.
So for my phone, it actually works in the opposite way.
If there's one of these folders
or any on the files within 'em
that I want to always be on my computer and kept offline,
I just need to choose which ones they are.
Easy to access and easy for me to change accounts
between my business and my personal.
So I also have Google Photos installed on my phone here.
This is how I woke up.
That looks good, doesn't it?
That's me.
I really like this app.
I think it's really, really good.
I think it's really easy to make searches,
to look things up,
to find past photos that I've taken.
For me, personally, it is way better than Apple iCloud.
I find that the syncing is automatic.
It just happens right away across all my devices,
where my experience with Apple in the past has been,
it's been a little bit laggy,
like 15 or 20 minutes,
which can be very frustrated,
frustrating if I'm working on a video
and I just want to maybe take a photo of something
or shoot a quick video on my phone
and then put it on my computer,
I have to do all these things
and like shuffle things around.
I just want to be able to take the photo,
go to Google Photos on my phone, done.
Done.
Let's see what else here.
Oh, look at that.
This is me doing karate.
I don't know if you guys know this,
but I'm actually a black belt.
That's true. (laughs)
That's not a joke, I'm not even kidding.
I'm actually a black belt.
I mean, I don't know, does that stuff go away?
I was a black belt in like college.
That's good, it's like eight years.
I could still kick your ass.
Depends how big you are.
I probably can.
So in addition to storing
all my files, photos, and media on Google Drive,
I also bought this little guy.
It's a Samsung solid state drive.
It's only 500 gigabytes, but that's really all I need.
All of my photos and videos
ended up being about 60 gigabytes,
and then like the documents that I had
were maybe a gigabyte, probably not even that much.
What was great was,
like before I did any of the transferring,
before I was moving stuff from iCloud and from Dropbox,
I got this, and I put everything on it,
because I wanted to make sure that it was secure
while I was doing these things.
It can be very nerveracking to switch these systems
and move where all of your photos and videos are stored,
and I could have potentially lost five years' worth
of images and memories if I hadn't done it this way.
Luckily, I didn't. (laughs)
I didn't screw up on the process.
But this has been super helpful.
And it's also just like reassuring to know that,
in the future, I'm always gonna have my stuff backed up
on this hard drive, a physical copy.
Solid state, it's definitely a lot more reliable
than a typical hard drive that has moving parts in it.
I've now set up on my calendar to remind me every six months
to just make a backup.
I don't expect that I'm gonna lose
any data through the cloud.
I've never had any problems losing data
through any of these servers
through companies like Dropbox or Google,
but just like peace of mind every six months,
to make sure that I've got my stuff backed up.
So let's talk about note taking and task management.
In terms of note taking,
I keep track of all my video ideas, flesh out concepts,
and store everything outside of my brain into Apple Notes.
And I use that across all devices.
I've created separate folders
for each item here that I'm working on.
(laughs) As you can see, I need to look at that Videos tab.
I'm telling you, there are not 206 great ideas.
A whole bunch of shit in there, maybe three good ideas.
But then I just kind of order this
in a way that makes the most sense to me,
according to the things that I use most,
and then I have this Archived folder down at the bottom,
and this just allows me to keep those ideas
and keep that text that I might need,
but filter them out of my actual main folders.
And this system works really well,
syncs instantly across all my devices,
and I've gotten a lot of value from it.
Now, for task management,
I keep track of all my tasks in an app called TeuxDeux.
There is a mobile app, but I also use it on my web browser.
As you can see here, these are the items
that I haven't gotten to yet.
Yes, Natalie and I are planning on
going horseback riding for her birthday.
That's not a joke, that's a real thing as well. (laughs)
These are obviously the things
that I have gotten done today.
If I wanted to add a new item,
I'd just click Add New Item,
and then I say, "Call The Rock."
Done.
Boom, it's on the list.
Let's say I can't do that today.
I'm like, "Aw, I'll just push it to tomorrow."
It goes to tomorrow.
If I don't actually do an item on the list,
it's gonna automatically push it to the next day.
It's just a way for me
to easily manage the things in my life,
and just to basically organize it on a per-day basis.
And finally, what's still a work in progress for me
is figuring out what to do with all of my local storage.
Now, when it comes to my hard drives,
this is not even the tip (laughs) of the iceberg.
It's a problem.
(jazzy music) I have terabytes
and terabytes of footage,
and every time I want to move footage
from one drive to another,
it takes me about six to seven hours.
While I don't get very sentimental about physical objects,
I like having a copy of all my work from the past 10 years.
Some of it makes its way into current projects,
but considering all the work
that went into these projects on these drives,
I don't mind the tiny amount of physical space it takes up.
We are currently working towards
getting a bigger RAID system,
about 240 terabytes, basically a server
to connect to multiple computers
at an office that we haven't (laughs) yet gotten.
If you guys are interested in how that will be set up,
I imagine that maybe 2% (laughs) of you will,
I'm going to probably be sharing a video
about that process as it gets built out on Instagram TV,
so if you guys haven't already,
just follow me on Instagram, it's @mattdavella,
and that's gonna be the place where I share that.
I just think that's gonna be the most boring thing
for me to talk about on this channel,
and I just think that there's (laughs) gonna be
so few people that are interested in,
it's not even worth it,
but anyway, there's other good shit on there as well.
I don't just talk about servers, trust me.
And that right there is how I organize my digital life.
I'm gonna be going into even more detail into future videos
about what's on my phone, how I manage email,
and other topics that might interest you.
If there's something in particular you want to see from me,
be sure to leave a comment below.
Of course, subscribe if you haven't already.
So that took me about three or four days
to go through and do all of this.
I would say most of the work was done in a day,
but then it just took me an extra couple days
to start to like work through all these physical hard drives
and transfer everything over.
I gotta say, now that I'm through all of this,
it was oddly satisfying.
Like just clearing the clutter of my computer,
it felt really good.
It was like ASMR for people with OCD.
That's a really good idea.
I'm gonna, hold on a second.
Wait a minute.
What do you guys think about that idea?
Is that a good idea?
Thanks for watching the channel, guys.
I'll see you next time.
This has been Matt D'Avella,
whispering into a microphone, bye.