Digital Hygiene

“If you can't even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — Jordan Peterson

Ok, we’re not talking about personal hygiene here…

We talking about something even more gross, digital hygiene.

No One Tells You to Wash Your Hands

A list of the dirty things, you need to know about when working online that no one will straight up tell you.

💩 Meeting Etiquette

• Don’t cancel/reschedule less than 24 hours before a meeting
• Don’t turn up late, it looks pretty bad
• Don’t call or request a call with someone between 9pm-6am (check their timezone)

💩 Over Communicate

It’s easy for people to misunderstand you.

Make everything explicit, repeat often and don't shy away from giving people updates on how things are going.

This is especially critical when things aren’t going as planned. Provide updates as often as you can.

💩 Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Now this isn't the most fun thing to do.

But something that’s good to get into the habit of doing online is checking your work after you have created it.

You’d be surprised how often there are mistakes and things that can come across as unprofessional to others.

💩 Don’t Dox Yourself or Others

When sharing things online be mindful of whether that content contains your own & others’ personal identity or sensitive information.

For example:

• Names
• Addresses
• Account IDs
• Emails
• Phone numbers
• Website login URL
• Bank information

The more of this information that is out in the public eye, the easier it is for a malicious actor to use this information against you.

💩 Avoid Task Switching

There’s a lot of research out there on this, but the essence is that doing too many things at once lowers your ability to execute any one of those things well.

A better approach would be to focus on each of your tasks, one at a time, very intensely.

Some practical ways to achieve this:

• Minimise the number of active tabs you have open..bookmark them instead

• For urgent but short-term tasks (i.e. today stuff) use a notes app to list up the 3-4 main tasks you need to get done (it re-focuses you to get the most important things done) Delete each one as you complete them for an extra boost of dopamine!

• Use a task planning app to dump in long-term tasks you can’t handle today, but want to get to at some point in the future

💩 Hit Inbox 0

This is the ‘Promised Land’ for productivity bros.

The idea of inbox 0, is that you treat your email inbox as a task list and you try to clear that task list each day by archiving (not deleting) emails once you have dealt with them.

Benefits of this approach:

• You don’t miss emails or replies
• You can find email conversations at any time as they are still stored, just not visible
• You save time trawling through 100’s of emails to find the one you need to respond to
• Clearer mind not starring at so many emails

I’ve been practising this for years and it’s been amazingly liberating!

The view of my inbox right now:

💩 Don’t Send People Things That Look Bad

Links

When you copy links online, just be aware that often they contain a lot of UTMs on the end and are not the cleanest to share on social media or in a DM.

Just delete the random stuff off the end of a link before you send it.

LinkedIn Example:

Before: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryan-staley_20-minute-marketing-org-ugcPost-7062371353441492992-RdAd?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

After: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryan-staley_20-minute-marketing-org-ugcPost-7062371353441492992-RdAd

Youtube Example (They have a built-in link shortener for sharing links!):

Before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4Bsr-D5iQ4&t=4s

After: https://youtu.be/N4Bsr-D5iQ4

Docs & Spreadsheets

Digital Basics Everyone Should Know..

Copy

Copy text or images:

PC: Ctrl + C

Mac: ⌘CMD + C

Paste

Paste the text you just copied somewhere:

PC: Ctrl + V

Mac: ⌘CMD + V

Search Anything

Quickly look for text on a page with this shortcut:

PC: Ctrl + F

Mac: ⌘CMD + F

Pasting text without formatting

Paste text without the formatting with this shortcut:

PC: Ctrl + SHIFT + V

Mac: ⌘CMD + SHIFT + V

Switching Between Browser Tabs

PC: Ctrl + ALT + LEFT/RIGHT

Mac: ⌘CMD + OPTION + LEFT/RIGHT

Sweet, you’ve completed this section! 🥳  Time for a little break...