Seth Godin’s Five Steps to Digital Hygiene
I really appreciated Seth Godin’s straight-forward “5 Steps to Digital Hygiene“:
- Turn off mail and social media alerts on your phone.
- Don’t read the comments. Not on your posts or on the posts of other people. Not the reviews and not the trolls.
- De-escalate the anger in every email exchange.
- Put your phone in the glove compartment while driving.
- Spend the most creative hour of your day creating, not responding.
I’ve been practicing these in unplanned ways. I turned off email alerts on my phone recently because I didn’t like the impulse to check my phone when it beeped. I turned off Twitter alerts from my good.simple.open‘s account because it was getting a lot of activity in the early mornings and late nights. I’ve been practicing responding to opinionated emails with requests for constructive feedback: “Can you give me positive examples of this?” I hadn’t thought about putting my phone in my glovebox. But that’s a great technique. And I definitely want to spend my creative time creating, not responding.
It’s awesome to see this codified into 5 simple rules.