Cultivating a Mindful Digital Life

Last week, we empowered you with practical tips to take back control of your privacy, moving beyond the myth of ‘Nothing to hide.’ This week, we look at a related but equally transformative approach called Digital Minimalism.

Imagine a cabinet that’s overflowing. One that you dread opening because you are scared something might fall off. Whenever you get something on a whim, you use it once and somehow stuff it into the cabinet. You don’t remember you have the something, and you buy it again, only to use it and stuff it into the cabinet for later use. And then buy again, three years later, having completely forgotten that you had two of the something.

We do that with our digital lives as well. In this guide, we will look at what is leading to it and how to get it under control.

Navigating centralized ecosystems

An example of a centralized ecosystem is Google! You create a document on Google Docs, share it using Gmail. You receive your flight ticket on email and the next moment, you see the flight appear on your calendar. If you use Microsoft 365 at work, you would see something similar like this, wherein the document you created and saved just now is available to be linked into the email as you start composing it and hit the ‘Attach’ button.

This makes life quite convenient, with even features such as a single login, allowing you to handle all the work under the same umbrella.

These help in another way, which is, you have to now remember only one password for one account, but use fifteen services. A good thing in my book. One single service’s privacy policy applies, deleting that one single account lets you wipe your data across all the fifteen services.

Single point of failure

But that approach also means there is a single point of failure. If someone were to get a hold of your password for that account, they can essentially access all your data across all the services under that roof.

If you are concerned about privacy (you should be), using such an approach means that the service, if they decide to tap into all your data, have all kinds of data about you.

The third problem is vendor lock-in, meaning, now you are locked into the Google ecosystem (for example) and you find it very cumbersome if not impossible to move to another service.

You must weigh the pros and cons of the approach on the case-to-case basis and decide whether you want a centralized approach or the diversified approach. There is no one right or wrong answer to this.

Less is more

I once prided on having over 500 online accounts. Today, I am cutting down on them. I am going into each service, evaluating whether I need it, and considering deleting my account.

The weight of digital clutter

Hundreds of accounts means hundreds of notifications about one or the other incident or feature update on them. I found myself drowning in them and bulk-deleting emails or bulk-swiping off notifications because I just could not handle the load. My days seemed too short for all this.

I also realized, I had left open a vast attack surface. The more apps I have, the more I have to be vigilant about the vulnerabilities for security breaches. It also meant I had trouble managing the privacy settings across that many services. I simply lost track of it all.

When nineteen out of twenty emails that you receive are useless, you know you are in trouble. But I still tried to read their subject, judge whether I wanted to read the whole email or delete it. I had to do this for hundreds of emails in a week. I no longer had the time to catch up with friends and family.

Minimalism as the antidote

I still spend hours on end once in a few months, but now, it’s about what service I want to use and what to get rid of. I have a significantly smaller active digital footprint now, which I find easier to manage. With specific services for specific purposes, I delete my account on any service that I have not used in over a year.

This also means I have more time doing what I like rather than trying to breathe through the dings of notifications. Not to mention the amount of storage space saved on the phone because of deleting unwanted apps. It’s 2025, and I am still happy using a 64 GB phone, of which only 42 GB is used. I touch my phone only once in a few hours, unless I get security notifications (whose sounds I have turned on).

Two years ago, I could not imagine sitting down to write a piece like this in one go.

The geography of your data

A cloud is nothing else but someone else’s computer. Literally so. I am running this site on a computer owned and managed by Amazon. Now, Amazon must have placed this computer somewhere, isn’t it? Now, a “computer” is a bit too general a term for this purpose, but let us just focus on the storage space where my site files are stored. I have chosen Mumbai for it.

Laws and data protection

All your data on the cloud is on one or the other physical disk located physically somewhere on this planet. And it is important you know where. Because not all countries have equal data protection laws. India is a country with some of the stronger data protection laws, similar, in many aspects, to the GDPR. However, India does not (as of early April 2025) yet restrict data being sent across borders for processing. Therefore, as of early April 2025, it is up to us to do our due diligence and decide what data to give to whom based on where they process it.

If your data is sent to locations that have weaker data protection laws, or with a history of government surveillance, your data may be susceptible to access by such actors, while as a user, you will have limited to no recourse.

Limiting the data you give to services is the safest bet.

Practical considerations

Here are some points to keep in mind:

1. Any information that identifies you personally should be treated with sensitivity. Remember, this is not about innocence or guilt; this is about your rights and power.
2. Any information such as health data points or financial numbers or choices should be treated with utmost care. Do not share such information with anyone other than those that process it for you under a formal agreement. Even if it is a matter of a few thousand rupees.
3. Whenever sharing personal information, go through the privacy policy and see how the data will be used. And what rights you have as a user. See where their servers are located. This determines what laws apply.
4. Always consider privacy-focused or privacy-forward services as your first choice. As the second choice, pick services based out of countries with stronger data protection laws.
5. While not always possible, consider services that offer zero-knowledge encryption or end-to-end encryption, along with encryption at rest.

Work on the intentionality

At the core of digital minimalism is the concept of intentionality. You must have a clear purpose for using an app or a service.

Audit your apps

Get into the apps list on your phone and ask for each app: ‘Does this app add value to my life?’ Adding value is different from liking to use it. For example, an app that runs a Pomodoro timer for you. That’s unnecessary; it has value, but does not add value because your phone has the clock app in which you can set a 25-minute timer and a five-minute timer.

Similarly, most social media apps would fail the intentionality audit because they are just dopamine slot machines, which suck up a lot of time without adding real value to your life.

Go into your screen time and list out the apps that are taking away most of your time. Look at the apps where you are spending the most of your time. See if that time was worth spending, or if you could have spent that time doing something else. Delete the apps which don’t seem to add value.

Look at each app and see if there are open-source privacy-respecting alternatives to them. Typically, apps owned by large corporations which give away a lot for free are not the kind of apps you should be using because under the hood, they are doing something other than what the corporation says they do.

Defining the Essential

Secure messaging apps are typically essentials, as long as you are intentionally using them. For example, last month, I deleted my Telegram account because I didn’t feel it added any value to my life; I wasn’t chatting up any friends who weren’t already there on Signal or WhatsApp. Sure, you might have your reason to have Telegram. Everybody’s needs are different.

Navigation apps, again, are among the essentials. Pick one navigation app and stick with it. You typically don’t need multiple apps. In India, having used several navigation apps, I think Google Maps works best for me.

Finance and banking apps are another necessity. But evaluate whether you want to have Google Pay, PhonePe, BHIM, all of them. You could use just one UPI app, and they all work together—like how you can call a Jio number from an Airtel number, you can use any UPI app to send money to any other UPI account.

Note-taking, document editing, and other such productivity apps are essentials, but again, evaluate whether you need Google Docs, Microsoft Word as well as Apple Pages. Pick one, stick with it.

If you track physical and mental health and well-being, use apps for them. Just ensure your app is HIPAA-compliant and encrypts the data on your device before sending it over to any server. Health data is precious and them leaking is dangerous.

Digital distractions

Passive consumption has been linked to several health issues, as you may be well aware. If you think social media is a hobby, think again. A hobby is something you actively do. Like writing music or playing an instrument, drawing or sketching, writing, riding a motorcycle, shooting pictures, singing or dancing, craft work and so on.

Casual games are another time-waster. They suck up a lot of time without adding value.

Also look at apps with overlapping functionalities. A Pomodoro app is one such example.

Do you shop out of boredom? Then you should get rid of shopping apps. I was one such addict. Shopping for electronics. Small and large, just out of boredom. I deleted the Amazon app from my phone, and my time and finances are in better control.

Have a news app that goes pinging once every twenty minutes? Get rid of it. Unless you’re in the business of news or something you do for a living relies on the hottest news out there, disable notifications on these apps and check them once a day with a set time window. I allocate 15 minutes to news in a day. I have set screen time limits on the entire news category; the moment the time runs out, I stop for the day.

We will stop here, and address the rest in the article the next week.

• Tags:
• Minimalism
• Control
• Privacy
• Security
• Digital