Introduction

For as long as I can remember I have always tried to strive for as much minimalism in applications as possible, I have pondered and searched for a long time how to achieve a state of balance.

Where did such an idea come from?

Maybe you too encounter a dozen or so notifications flooding your notification bar on a daily basis: emails, SMS, communication platforms, social media, work, studies, friends... it makes a big miscellany, often such a phenomenon simply tires you out, you have to clean it all up. In addition, your screens are flooded from top to bottom with apps, often in random order, or not sorted into categories and so on. Widgets are a cool and nice addition, but they also clog up the screen, plus, at least so far still, they are not as responsive as, for example, in Android which detracts from their usefulness.

<aside> 🗣 Such things are very distracting to you. It distracts you from tasks that are really important. You are less productive because of it.

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It's also hard then to distinguish between notifications of value (e.g., email from college or work) and those junk ones like "discount coupon for food at restaurant XX from YY app" or "friend John Smith posted new Instastories, click to see them." Well let's agree, these are usually not important notifications, and they flood our devices if we don't set our notification preferences well. I guess it's impossible to achieve complete minimalism either in digital life or in real life, but it's worth trying, while you definitely need to be consistent.

A list to help you clean up your digital life

Based on my observations, I have created a list to clean up your digital life:

1. If possible, stick to one ecosystem and one workflow, such as iCloud and Notion
2. Choose one favorite email account client and hook up all your accounts there
3. Reduce the number of apps on your devices
4. Appropriately set yourself notifications and the apps that can send them
5. Use Focus Mode on iOS / iPadOS / macOS
6. Enable Notification Summary
7. Personalization, i.e. widgets, wallpapers and tidy home screens

Below you will find detailed explanations for each of these points.

Ecosystem & workflow

This is a big topic, but it's all about optimizing the storage of various types of materials, and ultimately using as few tools and applications as possible to do so. The topic would easily lend itself to a separate huge article, or even easily to a book, but I will write a few words about it.

Different ecosystems and working environments

Maybe you also have that you use several cloud providers at once, or multiple applications to manage tasks? You probably do, it's not a bad thing, but it is sometimes unnecessary redundancy.