The digital landscape is changing so frequently I often get a headache just thinking about what’s coming up next.

While the attraction of shiny and new has always been an alluring temptation, it’s now wearing me down. Considering over the past ten years, it’s now commonplace to see:

• Services you once relied on get bought out or shut down
• Compatibility issues with files you’ve been working on… even when it’s still in the same program/ecosystem
• Data breaches at companies that obtain personal information
• The birth of the “endless scrolling” on social media, which quickly turns into doom scrolling depending on the news cycle
• A thousand different services offering a thousand different conveniences, forcing you to remember a thousand different logins (or store them somewhere and hope where you stored them is safe)
• Programs you’re used to that suddenly change and lose the functionality you enjoyed about them
• Relying completely on cloud based services only to have your Internet service go down because a construction project near your service provider accidentally cut a main wire
• A lot of time wasted just mucking about within programs/services instead of actually doing something

All of this for the sake of making your digital life, and supposedly your real life, a little bit easier.

Yes, there are some conveniences that are hard to live without now—especially in a world that’s locked down. But for the rest of it? I’m done.

My goal now is to make my digital life a lot more inconvenient so that I’m more purposeful in what I do online. A few steps taken:

• I’ve set my browser to never remember any of my logins or passwords… or to keep me signed in anywhere—no more “quick checks”
• After Evernote lost its way, OneNote dumped its desktop version for a web based one (thereby losing all the features I liked about it), I now use plain text files for all my notes
• On that point, all my writing is now done in plain text (using markdown syntax if needed)
  • Plain text has been around forever and I never have to worry about compatibility issues with any system, nor wonder how to extract all my notes and port them elsewhere
• My phone hasn’t given me a notification in over a year (I turned them all off and it’s been quite satisfying)
• Abandoning almost all online services in lieu of just a few and replacing the rest with desktop equivalents

I’m still going, but what what’s really happening is I’m making digital life harder by making things simpler.

When you simplify your tools to the essentials, what you find is that it’s difficult to create something, but easy to tinker with it. The convenience tools are nothing more than a distraction from actually doing something worthwhile.

There’s also less to worry about because you don’t have to worry about updates, iterations, abandonments or corporate takeovers.

In fact, making a digital life harder could be key to making your personal life better.