In today's world, everyone needs a digital system — specifically their own individual digital system. This system makes it possible to immerse yourself in the digital world and to take advantage of everything digital. Many people are not aware of this fact, since smartphones and the like can be used to immerse themselves in the digital world very quickly and apparently easily and effectively. However, looks can also be deceiving. There are some basic things that should be tackled systematically — in that very Digital System.
In recent years I have been intensively involved with an approach to a digital system. Now I would like to introduce it to you and show you, how to make the digital world work for you, in such a way that it creates value. At first, time savings should be mentioned here as in a very classical way — but it gets even more interesting with higher-value benefits.
The world is steadily moving towards a knowledge society. For every single person it means doing more and more knowledge work — regardless of whether this happens professionally or privately. It means being able to deal with digital and digitized data, your own or from third parties, and to generate value from this data — after all, knowledge is power and ultimately leads to better decisions. It should not be underestimated how much the proportion of physical work will decrease in the future.
Before we deal with the various apps and services, we need a basis, a framework into which they can be integrated and form a complete picture — the digital system. And as it’s often the case, the total value of the system is greater than the values of its individual parts. This is not to say that the individual parts of the system do not provide positive value — on the contrary, it even makes sense to start small and add further areas and capabilities to the digital system step by step.
Since iPhone and other smartphones the individual digitization has been progressing more and more, more and more people have been looking at approaches and methods that can take this change into account. From my point of view, the best approaches for the digital world are the classic Getting Things Done by David Allen and a more recent approach by Tiago Forte namely Building a Second Brain (Blogpost ). At this point, I advise you to take some time to understand the two concepts. There are dozens of YouTube videos for Getting Things Done (often abbreviated GTD) and you'll quickly find something for Tiago's Building a Second Brain — e.g. here for Getting Things Done and here for Building a Second Brain.
Both approaches are a perfect introduction — but also provide a lot of food for thought. After the introduction, however, it should become more specific. You are quickly faced with the challenge of translating these great ideas into the digital world. It's all good that you can make your own decisions. However, I have found that a basic system is always necessary — and eventually emerges out of its own. This is exactly where I would like to support you so that you don't have to go the lengthy path and can reach your goal faster.
The digital system offers you an overview of all the necessary building blocks with their capabilities, so that the full potential of the digital world can be used and, based on this, the productivity approaches can be used and knowledge work can be carried out (we will take a look at these in a separate article).
I distinguish between two different categories of building blocks - passive and active - which I will introduce to you in this article.
The Passive category contains the building blocks that serve as the basis for the various areas of life and thus for the digital. In general, it can be said that digital data and information are primarily stored here. It is important that there is really only one central instance for each component - in IT terms a "single point of truth".
Where would we be without an email account. All accounts and services on the Internet revolve around an email account. Very often they cannot be used at all without an email account. So there is no choice, each of us needs at least one email account or address — a digital postal address for digital letters.
Here you should primarily pay attention to a reasonably speaking and easy to remember e-mail address. However, that doesn't mean you should give away your name directly in this address — unfortunately there are too many evil actors on the internet that you'd better only give as much as is necessary.
<aside> 〽️ With the email address "[email protected]" we can assume that this person's first name is Max and his last name is Meyer and he was born in 1989 - all from just one email address.
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In addition, you should make sure that you have enough storage space for your email inbox - depending on the amount of data that you will receive in a period of time. There are usually ways, for example, to archive very old emails — so that they no longer take up storage.