Digital Minimalism: Protecting your attention and focus

Chad Underwood
1 min readSep 1, 2022

Digital minimalism helps minimize anxiety and find more time for the things you love. Digital minimalism requires taking a deep look into the habits you’ve formed with your devices.

You need to find what you can’t live without.
Then get rid of the rest.

There’s 3 places you should start clearing the clutter.

  • Email
  • Apps
  • Files

Sorting through the email

Because we spend the most time with email, it’s easy for things to become overloaded

Most people live in their inbox using it as a to do list. This makes for a storage bin of clutter.

With a little time, this can be cleaned up.

  • Start with unsubscribing from irrelevant mailing lists.
  • Delete old emails in mass
  • Save needed emails in an archive folder

You don’t need those apps

The older our phones get, the more clutter we store.

You end up with hundreds of apps you don’t use. If you haven’t used them in a month delete them. Start using their mobile site instead.

So many files

If you’re like me, you still have files from 2007.

There’s no reason to hang to a majority of them. For the ones you need to keep, create an archive folder. Make sure the file name is easy to recognize the contents.

2017 tax returns.pdf is better than 041517 tax.pdf.

Spend 10 minutes a day organizing these 3 things.

You will never have to feel the anxiety of things to do.

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Chad Underwood
Chad Underwood

Written by Chad Underwood

American writer sharing experiences in life, writing, technology, and content creation.

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