We are all surrounded by digital goods, processes and interfaces, but we understand less about how an app on a cell phone works than any amateur knows about how to drill a hole in the wall halfway decent.

Yet we have long been so closely connected to the increasingly digital world that it shocks me to see how little we understand how to deal with digitality as a basic personal skill, despite all the innovation. I have reflected on my personal learning experiences and see the following tasks as important milestones on the path to “digital cognition.” Of course, this is not a “how-to” recipe that you have to follow blindly, but maybe one or the other inspiration is included.

1. keep a digital journal
2. digitize your task filing system
3. organize the collaboration in your environment
4. create your own website
5. integrate your learning into the social network
6. learn digital image editing
7. create a reporting about your finances
8. run a multilingual blog
9. build a robot
10. connect your activities into overarching digital processes

By the way, it doesn’t matter to see these tasks as “busy work” or “hero work”. No one is pushing you to finish at a certain time, nor do you need to be pressured to succeed with great results on social media. Most of that is a facade, be authentic with yourself.

More importantly, it’s the process you’re starting that will be with you for quite a while. Depending on how intensively you work on these issues, you’ll spend at least months, more likely years, getting your life optimally attuned to the digital world.

That’s a lot of work, so why should you consider taking this path? What you will learn in these tasks will happen on different levels

• You’ll develop digital literacy, which will help you manage your life better,
• you’ll learn ways to act that were previously closed to you,
• you will practice the basic digital skills on many different occasions and thus acquire a digital mindset,
• You will learn to present your know-how in a way that others can benefit from it,
• you will realize how important it is to be precise and stable in the right places and to let go in others,
• you will experience long frustrating phases where you don’t understand anything and you don’t succeed in reaching your goal, and you will learn how to deal with that,
• you will suffer losses because digital things are ephemeral and you will learn how to organize your work results in such a way that they last
• and you’ll learn to stay in the flow of development and to value that it’s not this or that single result that’s valuable, but the ability to be able to keep producing new results.

“That’s not for me, I’m not technical at all,” I often hear. Just then, the digital mindset is something you should definitely learn. Tax returns, road traffic or school are also “technical” and you have learned to come to terms with them. If you dare to start such a path, there are endless possibilities to shape your life in a way that is successful, valuable and meaningful for you and your environment.

Maybe I’ll give you some hints on one or the other topic when the opportunity arises 🙂