Interact online like a digital minimalist
“Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.”
–Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
There are already tons of tools to help you limit screentime, get off social media, and pull yourself away from the vanity and attention-mongering experience of the online world, but what about those people who need to be online?
Digital minimalists who are also social media managers (yes, they exist).
Digital minimalists who use email for our jobs (yes, we’re here!)
Many of us don’t have the privilege of turning off all social media, chunking our email time into one 5-minute window on Monday mornings, or turning off all computers after 5 p.m. (sounds dreamy, but it’s not necessarily practical).
Even with the rise of digital minimalism, the question still remains: how do we use technology more mindfully if we can’t get rid of it?
The answer comes in an unexpected place. With more mindful tech. We already know you have to use email, but you might want to use email providers like Hey.com instead. We already know that you have a bunch of subscriptions that cost you money monthly, but you may want to track them with Yorba. We already know that you buy gifts and items online. But you may want to manage or delete those accounts before they use your data to make tons of money, or worse, sell your info.
It’s hard enough to clean your inbox. It becomes infinitely harder when you’re bombarded with newsletters you don’t want, marketing messages selling you the next product that will make you more interesting, happier, skinnier, whatever. We know how that story goes. But to really achieve digital minimalism and reduce our digital footprint, we need to be mindful.
One place to start is to consider whether we need to add our account information to the sites we’re using. If you do need to, can you use a fake email address? Can you sign in as a guest instead? Can you make sure you’re opting out of marketing in the first place? Once that’s handled, you’ll want to start tackling the accounts you already created.
Yorba helps you do just that–just pop in your Gmail addresses and Yorba will scan the internet and dark web to find all your accounts and help you easily monitor, manage, or–you got it–remove them.
Think of it like a digital housekeeper–you come in once a month, checkmark the items you want to keep, check the notifications to see if any of your paid subscriptions increased, and then mass unsubscribe, delete accounts, and start quieting the noise.
If it sounds dreamy, that’s because it is. We created Yorba to quiet our inboxes, manage our subscriptions, and make our online accounts safer. We’re hoping the industry as a whole will catch on, but until they do, we’re here to help.
Want to see how Yorba can help you interact online like a digital minimalist? Become a member today.
