When it comes to my digital life, I think I'll classify myself as both an organized and disorganized person. Although I tether towards being organized more and I think that's because I love accessing my things very easily. There's only one way to achieve that, of course.
I'm not patient enough to scroll through endless unimportant documents, looking for one particular file. I'm not patient enough to sort through so many promotional mails, scouting for an important document. And that is why, many of my files are in strategic locations.
Being a student in this digitalized era, most of the lecture notes are shared virtually. And being a reader, I deal with ebooks. So many of them. Dealing with academic books and fictional books can be such a hassle when it comes to reading for academics alone. Your lecture notes could be sitting pretty in your library, and you find out that you've finished three fictional books, without as much as glancing through them, talk more of taking a sneak peek. It doesn't even help the fact that I have about 600 fictional books and my school files are just about 30 to 40.
To avoid distracting myself, and at the same time, save myself the stress of scrolling through insane amounts of ebooks, wondering why I'm still looking for a particular file, after over one hour of scrolling and peeking through fictional books, there's one thing I do. I compile all my academic ebooks for the semester into folders, name them according to their respective contents and combine them to form a zipped file. This zipped feature locks them all up in one place and so, when it's time to read or make reference to a particular document, I know where exactly to go. I love doing this a lot as it makes things a lot easier for me.
For my notifications, I think that's where I'm not so organized. Or maybe I am. I love seeing Whatsapp message pop up on my screen when I'm on another app. It helps me know when it's very important to enter the app, when it's a message I should ignore or worse still, a message I need to think twice about before responding. As much as I love seeing my WhatsApp messages, text messages and few other notifications at the top of my phone screen, there are some pop up notices that irks me the moment they come in. And so, whenever I go through the notifications that popped up, and done the necessary, I click the clear button.
To be frank, Snapchat notifications annoy me sometimes. Okay, Ms. A sent me a snap, I get it. When I decide to open it, I'll see it. So why then do you go ahead to remind me the next time I put on my data that the person you told me sent a snap, sent a snap? Was that really necessary? Why also do you have to notify me when someone posted for the first time in a while? How's that my business? There's Telegram also. The one that doesn't fail to let me know when a contact joins the app. What exactly does that have to do with my life? There's also phoenix browser with so many fake news. Twitter with their notifications about trending tweets. Opay, and notifying me about my coins that are about to expire. Pinterest and always reminding of how I have a good eye. Temu and announcing to me every day that I have two free packages waiting for me but I must refer ten people before I get them. Please, can we all just rest? These things piss me most times and to avoid them, I've refused permission for many of these apps to display notifications in the notification bar. There are only very few that have the permission to do that - Whatsapp, phone, Gmail, Instagram and my bank app.
For my mails, I have two Gmail accounts. One for apps I subscribed to and the other for important mails. I subscribe to mails a lot but I have a specific account for promotional mails and newsletters. The other account is for important mails like my bank notifications, school newsletters, which are very rare, and documents from special sources. That helps me, so I know where exactly to go to when I need something in that field. My other socials as well, are more guarded than organized. My WhatsApp most especially.
Have you ever been on your own, and all of a sudden, you're added to a group by someone who's not even in your contact list? I've experienced it and that has made me very strict when it comes to my WhatsApp. Being in so many unnecessary Whatsapp groups makes my whole interface appear busy and cluttered. I'll rather have only personal conversations than have a list of groups. So, for the very few I need to be in, I make sure it stays that way by setting my WhatsApp to only my contacts adding me to groups. I can't be going through the stress of exiting groups I didn't beg to be added to.
Currently, I love the way my digital life is and I don't think I'm ready to change a thing about it now. Maybe sooner or later in the future, I'll be craving a change but I love it's current state.
My entry to the digital lifestyle prompt for the week
Images are mine