There’s an almost OCD quality around the art of minimalism. Owning only the fewest of items necessary to deliver the quality and experiences you desire from life. Everything in its place and position. Feng shui’d to perfection if you will. A tidy desk / room / office / house is a tidy mind as they say.
I’ve been thinking about minimalism recently, but in terms of the digital world. I hate clutter. I mean I really hate it. Things have to be tidy and in their place, and this goes for my devices. My laptop and tablet desktops need to be organised and de-cluttered. The amount of apps installed must not be excessive. The amount of data on my hard drives should not be more than is necessary to allow me to complete my work and to entertain me. Anything else should be backed-up to secure storage.
Many years ago when working for a large corporation, one of my tasks was OS-hardening. This involved taking a working solution and performing a deep-dive into the operating system of each server with a view to reducing its footprint. By that I mean reducing the amount of hard drive space needed in order for the system to perform the required tasks to the agreed requirements, securely. That meant removing all unnecessary applications and files, streamlining the OS down to the bare minimum, thus reducing its footprint. This reduced the need for large storage media, sped up install and backup times, and reduced the attack surface.
Although I no longer perform OS-hardening these days, I still have this almost OCD compulsion to continue to optimise all my devices, reducing the amount of apps installed to just enough to perform the required tasks, and to keep the data on the devices to a minimum. It can be very cathartic at times, and it keeps my devices from running out of storage space and from draining the battery too quickly.
I call it digital minimalism.