Baby Steps Month is about small changes that can gradually redirect a messy digital life.
The previous step in the series was to delete something—anything at all. That was practice in doing the opposite of the activity that created the problem in the first place.
The next step looks tiny on the surface, but it can have a massive long-term impact: pause before collecting more digital stuff.
Baby Steps Week 2: Pause
We constantly have data flying at us from all directions. Everyone wants our attention. Everyone needs us to believe that their thing is more important than everyone else's, or at least important enough for us to keep, or to look at for 30 seconds, or 5 seconds, or something.
It's understandable. Businesses compete for smaller and smaller slivers of attention. Advertising is cranked up to 11. Have you seen the sea of YouTube thumbnails lately? At some point, boring thumbnails start to feel like a promise of authenticity instead of marketing.
But some of the information really is worth keeping. The challenge is figuring out whether it truly adds value to your life before it becomes one more item to manage.
This week's baby step is to pause long enough to reconsider.
I said "reconsider," not just "consider," because nobody is blindly accepting everything. You already make decisions about what to keep. The point is to slow that decision down just enough to be more deliberate.
Do you sign up for newsletters, buy another ebook, pull out your phone for another photo or video, or hang onto that "GREAT SALE!" email because you think you might need, want, or use it someday? Do you later notice those same digital items and realize you didn't need them after all?
Try catching yourself when you're about to keep something without a definite purpose and timeframe for action. Before you click that Save button—or neglect to click Delete—reconsider.
- Will you really be better off with this email? Or would you even notice if it hadn't arrived?
- Do you need all 87 photos from this event? Or would two or three be enough?
- Will you actually read that free ebook PDF? Or is it just going to become hard-drive dust?
Maybe you'll still save it, and that's fine. The goal is simply to interrupt the process and make really sure before you do.
Information we collect without a good plan for how we'll use it in the future usually becomes digital dust. Give yourself the freedom to avoid collecting it in the first place, and practice saying no more often.