Chapter 8

Sustaining Digital Minimalism and Filling Your Free Time With What Are Important to You

If you don’t fill your free time with quality activities, something else will fill it and this might be digital tools…

When you embrace digital minimalism, you will gain some extra (free) time. It is almost certain that you are going to relapse and go back to your old ways of using digital devices aimlessly unless you make efforts to fill this free time with rewarding activities.

Free time created by embracing a lifestyle of digital minimalism will make you feel lonely if you don’t make a conscious effort to fill this time with rewarding and engaging activities.

In this chapter, we are going to be looking at things you can do to fill the free time created by embracing digital minimalism. In addition, we are going to be discussing what to do to sustain a digital minimalism lifestyle.

Note: Even after filling your time with a lot of engaging and rewarding activities, it is almost certain that you will feel some degree of loneliness for the first few weeks of practicing digital minimalism. This is probably due to the change you are going through.

Change is not always easy, and it will take some time to get great satisfaction from doing other things different from aimlessly moving your hand on the screen. But after getting through this period of resistance, you are most likely to wonder how you ever survived aimlessly playing with an LCD screen. You will wonder why you were so naïve to let big organizations control how you spent your time.

What You Can Fill Your Time With as a Digital Minimalist

1. Involve yourself in community works

Involving yourself in community works is one cool way to get fulfilled more than you do when you use a social media network or aimlessly wander on the internet. Doing community work allows you to give back to the community that shapes you. It is one of the best ways to use your free time. In addition, usually, it is far better than spending time chatting with people online.

2. Spend time with family members

One thing that digital devices take away from you is spending time with your family members. Many times, people prefer staring at their screen than discussing with their children. In fact, it is now a common thing to see people chatting on a social media platform while they discuss with a family member or a friend.

Instead of aimlessly wandering on the internet during your free time, we will recommend you spend more time with people you love and strengthen your relationship with them. After all, your family members will be more important to you on your sickbed than your social media account or followers.

3. Pay visits to your friends and family members

It is very exciting when you travel to visit a friend. Many people will be happy if they know that you have traveled purposefully to pay them a visit. We believe you will also love the experience. Instead of spending the next weekend chatting on your phone aimlessly, why don’t you consider visiting a friend or family member?

4. Pay visit to elderly ones

Instead of spending hours commenting on posts that do not concern you, you can make the elderly ones in your community happy by paying them a visit. Many elderly ones are depressed because they are often left alone with no one to play with them. We are all busy chasing material things, and unfortunately, during our free time, we prefer to watch television or chat on social media platforms.

Instead of spending our time watching television or chatting online, we can make the elderly ones happy by paying them a visit and playing with them. When we do this, we will make them happy and also learn from their wealth of experience.

5. Learn a skill or craft

There are many beautiful skills you can learn during your free time. Some of them include woodworking, knitting, gardening, plumbing, painting, among others.

The list of crafts you can learn during your free time is a very long one, and you will not probably get enough time to work on all of them. Instead of spending your free time jumping from one website to another, why don’t you pick up a skill and learn it thoroughly?

6. Read a good book or listen to audiobooks

Another thing you can do during your free time is to read a good book or listen to an audiobook or audio lecture. There is a lot of useful information in great books, and you can never read them all if you are to commit the rest of your life reading them. So, instead of wasting your time reacting on a social media platform or playing with a digital device, you can read a good book and learn how to better your life and the society.

7. Learn another language

Learning another language is a very rewarding experience. In addition, learning another language is good for your brain. There are reports that learning a second language may give some benefits to the human brain. In fact, in a literature review done by Blanka Klimova, she noted in her conclusion that studies suggest that learning a foreign language may generate some cognitive benefits for older individuals^[1].

8. Take a course

Is there any course you have always wanted to take, but there is no time? If yes, now may be the time. If you have established that taking a particular course will bring you some true benefits, then you may consider using the free time created by digital minimalism for it.

9. Take a walk in nature

Spending time in nature is good for your mental health. As much as you can, schedule time to avoid the chaos and be with your thoughts in a natural environment. To learn more about the benefits of spending time in a natural place, please go here.

10. Keep a journal

Journalling is an efficient way to reduce stress and better manage your life. In your free time, we recommend you give journaling a try.  We believe you are most likely to love this art.

 11. Exercise or simply take a walk

One of the things you can do in your free time is to exercise or simply take a walk. Taking a walk will allow you to reflect on your life and burn some fats. Please give it a try.

Doing all that is mentioned above might still not be enough to keep you on the path of digital minimalism. This is why we will give you some extra tips to help you sustain the lifestyle of digital minimalism.

Tips to Sustaining Digital Minimalism Lifestyle

Below are the steps to follow to maintain the culture of digital minimalism.

1. Have a list of reasons why you must not give up digital minimalism

We believe you embraced digital minimalism for a reason. It may be because you realized that you have become a slave to digital devices or because social media is taking a better part of your life, among others. We will recommend you list out all the reasons that made you embrace digital minimalism and keep this list where you can easily access it.

You can use this list to design a picture or infographic and then make this picture or infographic the wallpaper of your phone or computer.

When you see reasons why you embraced digital minimalism in the first place, it becomes really easy to continue digital minimalism when the going gets tough.

2. Find a better alternative for your online activities

To really sustain digital minimalism, you need to find alternatives to some of those things that used to take your time online.

Please see above (see What You Can Fill Your Time With as a Digital Minimalist) to learn about some things you can do instead of involving yourself in online activities.

3. List out how your life has developed since you embraced digital minimalism

We believe if you implement digital minimalism properly, your life should improve in many aspects. We recommend you take time and write down all aspects of your life that have benefited immensely from embracing digital minimalism.

For example, you may realize that after embracing digital minimalism, you now have more time for yourself and your loved ones. Also, you may realize that your self-respect/self-esteem increased since you now have more control of your time and how you spend it.

Listing out how you have benefited from embracing digital minimalism will make you want to stick to the lifestyle (i.e., digital minimalist lifestyle) that has brought you so much joy.

4. Use software blocking apps to your advantage

There are times that it may really be tough to stay committed to digital minimalism. In times like these, you can use software blocking apps to get yourself going.

Software-blocking apps are apps that can be used to restrict access to the internet, websites, or apps. Software-blocking apps make it easy to block social media apps/websites, gambling websites, pornography websites, dating websites, entertainment websites, among others.

We recommend you consider using software blocking apps to block or restrict your access to those sites or apps that threaten your digital minimalist lifestyle. See Chapter 7 to learn more about this type of apps.

5. Work as a team, get a digital minimalism partner (or partners)

Things can get really easy when you work as a team instead of as an individual. Instead of doing it all alone, you can find a digital minimalist partner. For example, you can ask your wife to be your digital minimalist partner.

Some of those things that you can do with your digital minimalist partner include:

• Discussing how to improve your digital minimalist lifestyle.
• Asking your team member about the greatest challenge they have faced while trying to implement the digital minimalist lifestyle and how they have overcome it.
• Lending a helping hand to one another.

 6. Limit the number of digital devices you have

The more digital devices you have, the easier it becomes to quit digital minimalism. Digital clutter only exists because we have digital devices. We need not say that there was nothing like digital clutter 200 years ago. One easy way to stay connected with digital minimalism is to limit the number of devices you own or use. We will recommend that you don’t own more than two digital devices. One computer and one phone (without browsing capability) might just be all you need.

In addition, consider chaining down your devices when not using them. Please go to Chapter 3 to learn more about this.

7. Join a beneficial digital minimalist forum or discussion board

You can learn many things from others when you join a beneficial digital minimalist forum. We are not talking about a forum that wastes your time and digitally clutter your life. We are talking about a forum that adds values to your life and gets your questions about digital minimalism answered.

 8. Reward yourself

It is a nice thing to reward yourself after completing a digital minimalism milestone. For example, you can reward yourself after consistently following digital minimalism culture for six months. The reward can be in the form of buying a special gift for yourself.

While it is a good thing to reward yourself after completing a milestone, we will like to let you know that this should be done in moderation.

After filling your free time with great activities and applying tips to sustain your digital minimalism lifestyle, you still need one more thing to ensure you don’t backslide. You need to know how to stay informed while practicing digital minimalism.

How to Stay Informed and Still be a Digital Minimalist

Combining staying informed and digital minmalism requires some level of wisdom. As a digital minimalist, you can’t afford to aimlessly wander online/watch the television all in the name of staying informed about what is happening around you.

To stay informed and still be a digital minimalist, we will recommend you do the following:

1. List out those categories of news/information that interest you most and are in agreement with your goals. Keep these categories as few as possible. Only include those categories of information that truly add value to your life.

2. List out top reputable websites that give out news/information in the category listed above. Please make sure you don’t list out more than two websites under each category. Listing more than two websites under each category may create a digital clutter in the long run, and this is not good for you as a digital minimalist. Less is better for a digital minimalist.

3. Select one or two days in a week (but not more than four days a week, unless your work dictates otherwise) to read information from the websites you selected in step 2 above.

If you must read the news every day, we recommend spending very little time doing so.

4. As a digital minimalist, your focus should be on getting informed about what is most dear to you when you choose to do so and not as they happen. Trying to consume information/news as they happen will probably get you controlled by digital devices. This is because you will need to be glued to the screen of your device to get news as they happen.

As a digital minimalist, you should be the one dictating when you consume news and not the other way round.

5. Always have it at the back of your mind that most of the news/information poured out daily will add little or no value to your life, and therefore you should not worry about missing out because you have decided not to be consuming news as they happen.

6. Consume news and information through a website and not through watching television. Watching television is a poor way to stay informed as a digital minimalist. Websites allow you to quickly scan through information and pick those you need; watching television does not allow this.

7. Don’t spend more than one hour per session when reading news on a weekly basis. Giving yourself too much time may make you read those things that are simply there to waste your time.

You may first worry about missing out on important information/news, but we believe that you will realize that you don’t really miss out on the most crucial things as time goes by. In addition, the happiness you get from being in control of your digital life is invaluable.

Furthermore, if there is any urgent news you need to hear, we believe you will probably get to know about it in a timely manner from friends and family members or work colleagues.

References:

1. Klimova, B. (2018). Learning a Foreign Language: A Review on Recent Findings About Its Effect on the Enhancement of Cognitive Functions Among Healthy Older Individuals. Frontiers In Human Neuroscience, 12. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00305