Few premises: I’m on Mac and this post is Mac oriented. So if you’re on Windows or Linux, sorry. You could maybe achieve something similar using a different email clients though.

Also, both my emails are hosted by Google. I have one traditional Gmail account for personal stuff and one GSuite account for work related things. Which means the two inboxes are 15 and 30GB respectively and I don’t have to worry about space.

With that in mind let’s get started.

My history with email clients

I tried a bunch of different clients during the years. I went through Sparrow before it was bought and killed by Google, I tried AirMail, Polymail, Unibox and Spark. To be honest with you, I wasn’t happy with any of those clients.

Don’t get me wrong, they were ok and did the job but I’m a weird person and I like simplicity. Sometimes I want a tool that does one thing and nothing more. Smart inbox is nice, filters are great but I don’t want to use them.

I want to get my emails, read them, reply to them and archive them.
And that’s it.

My current setup

My current inbox looks like this

Yes, it’s quite minimal. I want my inbox empty. If there’s something in there, it means I have to do something about it. And that something is either archive it or reply to it. But before I dive into the ins and outs of this set up let’s see how you can set it up.

The Settings

The first thing you wanna do is set up Mail as your default client and turn off all notifications. I hate notifications. I don’t want my mac to ding or ring at random. Plus, no email is really urgent in my world. You can adjust this according to your preference though. That’s up to you.

As for the font, I like to use San Francisco but that’s also a personal preference. Size is also up to you. 14 is the sweet spot in my opinion.

Next up we have viewing options. A couple of things here. You don’t want to use the classic layout because it need too much horizontal space. You can however turn on the contact photos as well as the list preview.

I have both turned off because I don’t need to see pictures and I don’t need to have a preview of the message. I want to open the email to see what’s inside and then decide what to do.

Next you want to set Archive as the default action to the discard move. This will allow you to swipe left on the message to show the archive icon. As I said at the beginning, I archive everything since I have plenty of space available in my inbox.

You also want to have the most recent message at the top.

As for the option when you’re composing a new message, I’m not a fan of quoting the entire message every time so I turned off that option.

With the settings done, we can now move into the View options and hide everything that’s not necessary. You want to hide the tab bar, sort the messages by date and have the most recent at the top, hide the Mailbox list, disable the Message Filter and hide the Favorites Bar.

You do want to to keep the Toolbar though because that’s where the search fields lives.

We can now move to the toolbar. If you right click on it you can customize it. As you can see from the picture below, I deleted everything and the only thing left is the search field. And in order to have the search field centered inside the window I added two spacer on each side of the search field.

Also make sure to display the icon only.

As for the message window, things there are pretty straightforward.

Each message opens in a new window and as you can see from the picture, the only button left in the toolbar is the reply button. I’m not a fan of replying all but you can tweak that based on your needs.

And that’s pretty much it. You should now have an uber minimal email client. I particularly like it because it’s super focused.

If something is in my inbox I need to act on it. And I have only two options available: reply and archive. If I need to get an old email I have a handy search bar always available at the top.

If you decide to give this setup a go let me know. Also let me know if you have ideas about how to improve it. I'm always happy to try new things.

This month was a total success. Did I fail? Yes. Big time.

I managed to go without podcasts, that wasn’t too hard. I didn’t feel the slightest temptation to even check if there were new episodes to listen to.

What surprised me was how hard it is to live and work without music.

That was really unexpected. I was discussing this with my friend Carl a few days ago and as I said to him, I can probably go without music easily during the summer when I can spend more time outside doing stuff.

But in February, when most of my time is spent inside, in front of my computer it’s really tough. Particularly hard because not much is going on outside since we’re in the middle of winter and nature is still at sleep.

Anyway, very interesting experiment, glad I did it.

Next up is my month with no sweets, cookies and cakes.

You’re probably reading this on your computer or your phone, you might be sitting at your desk, or at a table in a coffee shop. Or maybe you’re on your way to somewhere and you’re reading as you walk.

Whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, this is it. This is your life.

So pay attention to it. Every sensation, every sound, every color. Don’t take anything for granted.

Memories are important, dreams are necessary, but this, this present moment you’re in, this is your life.
You’ll not get this moment back. You’ll never get any moment back.

Get the best out of every single one of those moment.
Be present and every now and then, remind to yourself that this is it, this is your life.

The no computer before lunch experiment was a success. Only once I had to open the email and that was because I pushed a client site live the day before and I needed to check if everything was ok.

I spent all the other days meditating and reading books.
I meditated every single day in January and I read 4 books which is great.

I think this is something I’m gonna keep as part of my life because it’s a really good habit and an important piece of a healthy daily routine.

February is no music and no podcasts and I already know it’s gonna be hard.

It’s as if the value of what you create is based on the number of clicks, likes, views, claps, hearts or poop emojis you gain.

And to me, all this, is extremely sad.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to be as guilty as everyone else. I was happy to reach a thousand followers on a stupid Twitter profile, “proud” of the numbers of followers I had on my Tumblr blog and excited by the number of page views in my Google Analytics dashboard.

But then I realized that all this is absolutely meaningless. Not in absolute terms obviously. There are plenty of situations where you need numbers to “quantify” (justify?) the quality or the value of a project.

But are totally useless in the context of side projects.
If you’re building something because it’s your passion, stats are not important.

Right now I have no idea how many people read this blog, I have no idea how many people use my gallery daily or how many people follow me on twitter.

And frankly I don’t care.

A few weeks ago, while I was fighting my crazy mind, trying to bring my attention back to the breath, one thought appeared in my head: what if, instead of fighting to bring my attention back to the breath, I guide it towards something I want spend my mental energies on?

And that’s how I discovered that meditation is an incredible design and problem solving tool.
Instead of wasting hours browsing the internet looking for a solution or an idea, I sit in my room, close my eyes and simply think about the problem. It’s an incredibly useful exercise and more often than not, I come up with solutions faster that I’d do by browsing randomly the internet.

Especially because there’s no twitter or facebook or any other possible distraction on the meditation cushion.
It’s just you and the problem you’re trying to solve.

Plus it’s a relaxing exercise, and that’s always a good thing.

I own a phone.
People never call me.
That’s because my phone doesn’t receive phone calls.
It doesn’t because I don’t want to get disturbed.

So I own a phone.
A phone that's everything but a phone.

It’s time for me to accept this simple fact: I hate my phone.
This damn piece of glass and metal is nothing but a time waster.

I own a phone.
But one day I’ll no longer own a phone.
That day is not today.
Sadly.

But that day will arrive.
And I’ll be happy.
Without a phone.

I have to admit, this was an interesting experiment and it went way better than I thought.
The goal was to keep my internet usage under control and not to cap the speed (which is hard considering my phone connection is way faster than my home wifi).
After roughly 10 days I noticed a problem called Spotify.

I’m constantly streaming music and I hadn’t thought about that while I wrote down my challenges.

I solved the problem by doing something different for the rest of the month. I downloaded an awesome app called TripMode which is a utility app you can use to block internet access to certain apps.

I then went back to my home wifi but I used TripMode as a intermediate step every time I need to connect to the internet.

When I was using my phone as a hotspot, every time I need the internet I had to go and manually connect using the wifi settings on my Mac.
This constant act of connecting and disconnecting was forcing me to be mindful about what I need to achieve online and that was the whole purpose of this monthly challenge.

TripMode also has a counter so I could keep my total internet usage under control and stay below the 10GB I have available on my phone.
I finished the month using roughly 8GB (Spotify excluded) so it was a success.

Now it’s time to move to the next challenge, not using my mac (and probably my phone as well) in the morning. I’m gonna replace that time with more reading and meditation.

This is going to be fun.
And yes, I’m writing this in the afternoon.

I labeled 2017 as the year of declutter. This was not something I decided to do back in January but I found myself focusing on getting rid of a ton of things both physically and digitally.

And I was happy to have my friend Rob as a partner in crime in this endeavor. Half way through this almost became a game and was quite fun to go through my stuff and see what I could throw away.

On the physical side of things there weren’t that many things I could get rid of since my life is already quite minimal and I don’t own that much stuff. Biggest thing I gave away was my old PC and some other tech related stuff.

On the digital side things were much more interesting. I closed a ton of accounts, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions and got rid of a ton of domains. I’m very happy with that especially because right now my yearly fixed expenses (and I’m talking about everything web and work related) are below 1000€ while before were more than 3000.

In the last few months I also decided to close or give away almost all my side projects. I realized I was spreading too thin and found myself way too distracted most of the time. And that’s something I want to fix.

I finally passed everything related to the Visual Journal to my friend Ale since that’s his blog, I’m in the process of giving away my space Tumblr blog and I’m shutting down everything else except The Gallery.

Is Invisible is the only project I still don’t know what to do with. I’ll come up with something next year.

The declutter will continue in 2018 but I decided that 2018 is gonna be the year of getting my focus back. And in order to achieve that I already suspended the only social account I was using (Instagram and Twitter) which is a great first step.

I also stopped reading news and I’m slowly cutting down on every form of distraction.

And lastly but not least, I’m meditating more often and more consistently which is great.

So there, that was my 2017. Not a particularly exciting year but a useful one nonetheless.

You don’t need to take a position on every issue and it’s ok to simply be neutral and go on with your life.
Just wanted to put it out there.

And if you have the time, go read this post.
Absolutely worth it.