Digital Minimalism, Pt. 1

Frank worked for a major university in New York for 12 years and built up a sizable address book in the process. He left the job to pursue non-profit work — told his colleagues he’d keep in touch when he left.

Then one day, half of his contacts, calendars, and files disappeared.

No warning signs, no clues pointing to the black hole he had fallen into.

If you look closely, you can see Frank’s CUNY account in there.

Frank became a casualty of the modern age — where we place so much faith in our devices that we forget humans built them. Humans make mistakes.

So let’s look under the hood and see what really happened:

Frank didn’t know his content was scattered everywhere. When he added to his address book, contacts were going to the wrong place. His calendar invites didn’t show up on his phone app because the account wasn’t set up.

In my experience, I’ve found that 90% of individuals with multiple accounts do not know where their content is. That’s a staggering number.

This matters because you can’t focus on your work when your technology is slowing you down and causing you to lose productivity. If you don’t create a simplified and streamlined workflow, you can’t get the job done.

Let’s see how Frank is doing now:

By keeping each type of content in one place, we prevented him from falling into another black hole and losing information. I call this Personal Cloud Singularity. There are other types as well, which I’ll discuss in my next post.

If you feel like your tech workflow is lost somewhere in space, contact us at The Astro Lab to organize your digital life.