Delete, delete, delete! The Minimalist Challenge: Day 3
Last week I made a cake for my partner. I’ve been a pretty awful human lately and thought he at least deserved a cake as an apology. It’s a beautiful cake, I basically used a whole tub of butter, made it blue and put jam in the middle. It’s yummy.
This morning I dropped it on the floor.
I do stuff like this all the time. I lose stuff, drop stuff, trip over stuff. I remember this one time when I was staying with a family in South India. We couldn’t really speak each other’s language but because of me we formed a bond over chai. The first time they gave me a cup to drink, my hands betrayed me and it ended up sprayed across their garden. We bonded over chai because from that moment on they just laughed at me whenever they handed me a cup.
Oh! This other time I was on a school trip in Greece (Classical Civilisation and Latin whoop!). I was amongst the youngest there, probably around fourteen or fifteen so a very sensitive age. My older brother was also there with his cool friends. We were walking along somewhere and he decided to leap up a wall, don’t worry it wasn’t an ancient wall just a regular one. When I was younger I copied my brother a lot. I thought he was the coolest. He’s still pretty cool but I’ve got my own tragic thing going on now and I’m too old to still be copying him. I shall always be the slightly rubbish sibling who tries to work dragons into a conversation about the weather.
Anyway! My brother leaped up this wall and so did all of his friends. Even my friends managed to leap up. Imagine, if you will, a group of gazelles… leaping. And then me. I go to leap but I wasn’t as springy as the rest of these gazelles, my foot caught on the edge of the wall and my face planted into the red dusty rocks. Knees scraped open and my shame spread across the whole of Athens. The teachers had to do first aid on me which consists of them all crowding around trying to figure out how to open the plasters. And I spent the rest of the day covered in red dust and feeling pretty sorry for myself.
ANYWAY! For real! Let’s talk about decluttering our digital life!
Day 3 – Declutter your digital life
I mentioned yesterday how I don’t really like the internet that much and sometimes that dislike spreads to technology in general. It is such a big part of life that it’s completely impossible to ignore (post-modernism yo!). Luckily, I have a very tech-savvy partner. Not only is he tech-savvy but he frigging loves the stuff so he will periodically tidy my computer for me (or shame me into doing it) and in return I bundle through our house knocking stuff over, breaking stuff and falling into things. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think?
To me, a fun Friday night is going into my inbox and unsubscribing from all of the things. To me, a fun Sunday morning is going through facebook and unfriending/unsubscribing from all of the people that have annoyed me recently. So to do both of these things on a Wednesday morning plus more deletey things that make everything a little more quiet and call it work, is a like a party for one!
So this challenge is a breeze for me and necessary for your computer, phone, tablet, brain chip to run smoothly. Plus it feels really good. Here’s the list of the things I’ve done to declutter my digital life.
- Remove all of the crap from my computer desktop. *And not just put it into a folder for later but actually sort it and rename everything so they’re not called, ‘Untitled’ ‘Untitled 1’ and ‘Untitled 1 again’.
- Unsubscribe from all of the annoying emails I get from clothing companies. I’m so awkward when I go into a shop if they ask me for my email address I give it to them instead of just saying no thanks.
- Move old but important documents onto my hard drive.
- Uninstalling the shitty fitness apps that I’ve used once but never again from my tablet and phone.
- Sensible folders for all my photos which I moved onto a cloud a few months ago. Into a cloud? My cloud? I have no idea what I’m saying.
- Get rid of the annoybees on facebook and twitter.
- Cookies! Delete, delete, delete! (Just pretend your eating them as you delete them nom nom nom!)
Things I’ve still got left to do include: Sorting out my cables, updating everything, figure out how to not forget my passwords every other day.
But yeah! Today has gone well (after that thing with the cake). Don’t you think?