Time is the most valuable resource that you have
and very few of us seem to remember that.
I created this series on digital minimalism
for this very reason.
We spend so much of our lives now
connected to the internet.
I don't think this necessarily a bad thing,
in fact I'm really grateful
for what the internet has contributed to my life,
but I do think we have to learn how to manage and maintain our digital spaces
much like we do with our physical spaces.
Today I wanna talk about having the right habits with regards to technology.
A quote that I recently read in the book "The Daily Stoic"
by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
really stuck out to me.
"Endless pleasure becomes its own form of punishment."
As I've spoken about before,
I got a little bit of traction with my videos online recently
and this has presented a new issue I never had before.
I went from being able to
easily read and respond to every message I got
to literally receiving thousands a day.
This hilariously bad acting isn't really helping my case.
I'm super pumped about it actually.
It just came as a little bit of a surprise.
Even with the digital minimalism
that I had set up in my life, I realized that
I was overwhelmed,
and that I had some really bad habits with regards to
technology that I needed to change.
Being constantly connected,
constantly checking your phone, or social media,
and email
is immensely destructive to productivity,
to mental clarity, and for me, well-being.
Something needed to change.
So I decided to create a series of
rules and guidelines to live by that I physically wrote down.
These are rules that I now follow
that have restored a sense of well-being
in my life that is absolutely priceless.
You may not be able to apply all these rules to your life
depending on what you do,
but I think we can all do at least some of these things.
So we are just gonna dive in.
"Do not check social media or email until noon."
This started off as a fun, little challenge that I shared on Instagram.
What I wasn't expecting was the incredible impact that this had on me.
Having a parameter like this allowed me to focus on me,
and start off my day in a calm and centered way.
Before doing this, what would happen to me was that
I would maybe check comments or emails
and then 5 minutes would turn into three hours
as I got sucked into the cycle of responding to people,
and you know problem-solving.
I feel like when I start off the day that way,
I set the tone and, you know, a pattern that is so hard to break out of.
I usually wake up between 6 and 7 AM
and so with this rule, it basically means
that I spend the first 5 to 6 hours of the day
not even thinking about what's going on online.
I love this because I can say that the morning is mine.
I can do what I want at that time.
One minor exception to this is the fact that
I do sometimes post content on social media in the morning.
And the way that I kind of navigate this is
by preparing things usually the night before
and then going in with the mindset that I'm not checking comments
or messages or anything. I'm just there to upload,
say a photo on Instagram, and then right back out.
"Do not check social media, email or any messages while in bed."
In an attempt to differentiate what I do for a living
with my personal life, which by the way
the two got completely blurred.
I've been looking for ways to kind of separate the two.
Creating boundaries is huge.
And that's how I came up with the idea of this rule.
Having a physical location where the chaos
that happens online cannot follow me
is a really comforting thought.
Either my phone is
on airplane mode when it's next to me
on my nightstand OR I've been experimenting
with placing my phone on the other end of the room,
so that there's that extra bit of added distance.
"Do not take your phone with you to the bathroom."
This goes hand in hand with the previous rule.
We all do this. Okay? But once again
it's really nice to have breaks in moments
throughout the day where you're not constantly connected.
Make it an opportunity to just take a moment for yourself.
"Look at your food when you're eating."
Far too often, I sat down to eat and pulled out a video to watch
and before I knew it the food's gone
and I didn't get a chance to enjoy it.
My focus was elsewhere.
Food brings me a lot of joy and I just feel like
it was such a shame that I was doing that.
This is just something that I've been doing and I think
it could be really powerful to try and apply this
to your own life. But I like to think about where
the food came from, what went into preparing it,
everything that took place for this place to end up
in front of me, if that makes sense.
Once again, it's another opportunity to practice mindfulness.
"Track and limit your time on email and social media."
I recently created a video on
my experience tracking on all my time throughout an entire week
and that was a really eye-opening experience.
More than anything, it gave me perspective on
where my time and energy is going, and to be perfectly honest with you,
the results were pretty disappointing.
Since then, I've been a lot more intentional about limiting
my time on social media and email
to at most an hour a day,
usually in two half-hour long pieces.
What this usually means is that I ONLY have enough time to
read through the messages that I received in my inbox.
It's pretty incredible to think about this
but almost NONE of the message that you receive
require an immediate response.
At least for me, it's easily under 5%.
So what I started to do (and this has had a huge impact so far),
is to take only one day a week, and dedicate a couple of hours or a few hours
to responding to all of my messages.
I started doing this on Saturday morning,
which I'm really liking because I don't get responses until
few days later when Monday comes around.
This has been spectacular. I probably shouldn't
get this excited about email, but
I would highly, highly recommend trying this out, if you can.
"Set a deadline everyday."
Finally, much like not checking email, or social media until noon,
I like to cut things off at a certain time.
This is really important to me because I find that if I don't do that
I go to bed with my mind still wired up
and it makes falling asleep a lot more difficult.
Now, I would treat these guidelines like a list of suggestions.
Make it a little personal experiment, and see what works for you.
These might be difficult changes to make at first,
but trust me when I say that it definitely does get easier.
And making these changes
has given me
a measure of my own personal life back, which is fantastic.
And just remember this:
Endless pleasure becomes its
own form of punishment.
I think that's a fantastic reminder
when I get a little bit off track with things.
I really hope that you found this video helpful.
Like I said, this is part of an entire series
on digital minimalism
where I've been sharing all the things that I've done
to organise,
and just basically have a
healthy relationship
with my digital life.
If you found this interesting,
consider checking that out.
Also, I have a bonus
episode that I created a few months ago
available only on my Patreon page where I share
how I organize my music.
You can also follow my progress on
Instagram, where I do live streams every Sunday
to answer some of your questions.
Finally, you can sign up to my newsletter to get occasional updates
and additional resources to go along
with some of these videos.
And yeah, thanks for watching.