Digital estate planning is the work of making sure the electronic parts of your life can actually be found, reached, and dealt with by someone else. It has three components that are easy to confuse: an inventory of what exists, a legal grant of authority over it, and a practical route to access. Conventional estate planning handles the second and almost always neglects the other two.
The neglect has a structural cause. Wills, trusts, and powers of attorney evolved for assets recorded in public registries and held by institutions with transfer departments. There was no need to write down where the property was, because deeds and account statements did that. Digital assets have no equivalent registry, so an undocumented account is functionally invisible.
In practice the work is unglamorous: list the accounts, note which hold real value and which are merely administrative, record how each is secured, and decide who should receive what. The inventory is the part people skip and the part that matters most, because an executor cannot administer an asset they never learn about.
It also has a maintenance requirement that paper planning does not. Passwords rotate, devices are replaced, exchanges fail or are acquired, second factors change. A digital plan reviewed once and never revisited decays within a couple of years — which argues for a system that stays current rather than a document written once.