As some of you know, the other day I was a panelist on Maine Public Radio’s Maine Calling program, where the other guest and I discussed with listeners the topic of “Decluttering Your Life.” I was originally slated to share more details about digital decluttering but was not able to get to it so I thought I’d include some of the points I was planning to make here instead.
In my preparation for the show I came across the interesting factoid that the average smartphone owner daily uses only five apps, which got me to thinking about our use of technology in general. As for me, all of my apps fit on the home screen of my iPhone and I only use four non-Apple ones for banking, storage, reading, and browsing. And for what it’s worth, they’re all free.
One of my very favorite quotes from Henry David Thoreau is “Let your affairs be as two or three…keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” So to that end, I intentionally aim to limit my technology investments of time and money to a select few: Microsoft Office for Macintosh, Dropbox cloud storage, Adobe PDF Reader, and Amazon Kindle app. All but the Office software are free and I usually pay $150 for about five years of use for it.
As I write this, I am actually thinking of transitioning to Apple’s own suite of software solutions: Pages for documents, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations, as they are automatically included on all Apple devices. I find it helpful to select one ecosystem in which to operate so as to limit cost and compatibility issues. For example, Apple- or Android-based smartphones and Macintosh- or Microsoft-based computers.
I am reading Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals by James Altucher, who shares a story about Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. The martial arts form leverages an opponent’s strengths against them to gain an outsized advantage for the practitioner. And the founder’s philosophy can be summarized as “maximum efficiency, minimum energy,” which I like to think of as good advice for technology usage also.