I really appreciated Seth Godin’s straight-forward “5 Steps to Digital Hygiene“:

1. Turn off mail and social media alerts on your phone.
2. Don’t read the comments. Not on your posts or on the posts of other people. Not the reviews and not the trolls.
3. De-escalate the anger in every email exchange.
4. Put your phone in the glove compartment while driving.
5. 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.