Update All
I know I’m not the only person deeply annoyed by the aggressive red dots that announce unread texts, emails, and notifications. I try to keep a clean home screen, free of those red eyesores, but that damn App Store thwarts my efforts constantly.
I SWEAR I JUST UPDATED ALL APPS YESTERDAY, how can there be more updates already??!?!?!
Deep breaths.
As I was going through this almost daily ritual the other day, I took a quick scroll through the various apps appearing to need updating. Mixed in with a few near-and-dear apps like Lyft or GrubHub were New York Times (which I don’t even have a subscription to), Crossword Puzzle (which I downloaded in covid to distract me but have never used), and a few others I can’t even remember because they’re hidden in some folder I probably couldn’t even find.
Why am I bothering to update these apps I don’t even use?
This is one of those #firstworldproblems and, as you’ve probably guessed, not REALLY the point here. But going through this ritual made me stop and think: how many things am I routinely “maintaining” or taking care of that have little or no importance to me? Things that are taking up head space, energetic space, or physical space, that are only distractions to the things that matter.
When I stopped to think about what my “real life app updates” were, things started popping up everywhere: those papers that are always on my desk waiting to be filed or read or used (yet they just sit there), calls I keep meaning to make (and then don’t), chores that have been on my to-do list for months (but keep getting moved back, week after week)…these are the minutiae that drain my proverbial battery while adding little to nothing to my life.
Drains are not just present in the digital world. They’re in our day-to-day and if we don’t notice them once in a while, all our energy will go to pointless maintenance instead of the things that make our life worth living.
So maybe you stop and notice today…what “apps” (literal or figurative) are you wasting energy on? And where/how would you rather spend that energy?
