Digital minimalism

Digital minimalism is a type of minimalism, applied to your digital environment. Should you have smart devices, digital accounts, files, private keys, credential, applications, notifications, they all fall into your digital environment.

Why?

If you are a 90s kid, chances are you are using computers for more than 20 years. If you understand how files work, you probably also have some digital legacy, e.g. old photos, documents. Basically, you have a considerable digital footprint.

Let's look at 3 stories that highlight, why digital minimalism is important.

Let's start with photo copies of real world documents.
You know the story. You are asked to send a photo copy of your National ID card. You had this like dozens of time. If you did not keep it, you need to do it again.
But you probably have it. But where? Was it last year spring or summer when you last did it? Should you invest the time to search for it? Or just do the whole process again? If there is no central or at least well known place you are storing this document, you will have hard time getting it.

Another one is using different SSOs for different services

You want to log in to a site where you already have an account. Did you use SSO? If so, was it Google? Or Apple, or maybe Facebook? You definitely do not want to create another account, right?

Third one is passwords. Most people I ask has zero to no password management. They might have some passwords written on a piece of paper. But where is it when it is most needed?
They might have it in memory. But how many passwords can you memorize? I know a lot of people using the same building blocks with some logic for assembling unique passwords. Then you can technically memorize much more passwords. But is this really the way?
How do you know where did you use what version?

All of these stories describe situations where you already have some digital footprint, but you are unable to reuse it long after producing it. People at this point usually produce more footprint. New photo, Password reset email + new password. In IT project, this is analogous to technical debt.

Remember, your digital space is very similar to your physical space in many ways. If you keep order in your room, why wouldn't you keep order on your computer?

How?

How to keep your digital space minimal?
It's a question I've been asking myself for years. It involves many things, and it does not have a clear answer. Let's look at some aspects.

You want to have certain groups of digital data in a central
place.
It's your digital data, so decentralization does not help, only makes things more complex. Distributing the data on the other hand, while still adds to the complexity, it is useful if you want to avoid risk of platform lock-in, data storage service/device failures.

Let's take photos as a perfect example. I've been collecting photos of myself, my family, the events I attended and so on. Although the photos were created by maybe hundreds of distinct cameras, the photos are archived to a single place. I believe it's something a lot of us do. Be it Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, HDD/SSD, all photos are in a single folder. To achieve this, you may want to archive your photos several times a year. It's time you have to spend and prioritize, but at the end it's worth it. All your photos will be available and searchable in a single place.

The same goes for documents. Be it digital certificates, photo copies of real world documents, vouchers. Or any note you take, especially if it can be reused later. These should all be accessible from a central place.

Projects you work/ed on and related digital data is no different.
If you do some centralization, like described above
You will end up with a couple of file system folders. Ultimately, you can group all of these important folders to create your legacy digital database.

When you have this, that folder abstracts everything you have inside. This is a single entity which you can now do stuff with. You can start versioning it, make copies of it, distribute it, back it up.

See the process? You took little pieces that fit together and made a single source of truth version out of it. You gave it a name, and now you are able to talk about and act on it as a single entity. Even if there are 100k files in the folder.

Easier with software components than with hardware devices.