Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World - by Cal Newport
Date read: 2019-03-02How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Part of me is very depressed that a book like this needs to exist. But unfortunately, given how technology has become a major dependance in our lives and the negative effects that come along with it, I see why we need this book more than ever. Highly recommended for anyone struggling with technology and FOMO.
Contents:
- THE PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL MINIMALISM
- THE DIGITAL DECLUTTER PROCESS
- THE IMPORTANCE OF SOLITUDE
- TECHNIQUES
- MAXIMIZING LEISURE
- PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING
- HOW TO MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA
My Notes
I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
Digital minimalism applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools. A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they've learned, is to spend much less time using technology.
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the new smoking.
Intermittent Positive Reinforcement - "Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it's good for business." Attention-catching notification badges, or the satisfying way a single finger swipe swoops in the next potentially interesting post, are often carefully tailored to elicit strong responses.
The drive for social approval - If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval-which we're adapted to strongly crave. The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this "vital" information.
We didn't sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.
Minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.
Principle #2: Optimization is important.
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying - How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter?
More often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.
The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience-and this is a bet that seems to be paying off.
The very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.
Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.
Consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
The digital declutter focuses primarily on new technologies, which describes apps, sites, and tools delivered through a computer or mobile phone screen. You should probably also include video games and streaming video in this category.
Take a thirty-day break from any of these technologies that you deem "optional"-meaning that you can step away from them without creating harm or major problems in either your professional or personal life. In some cases, you'll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how you use the technology during the process.
In the end, you're left with a list of banned technologies along with relevant operating procedures. Write this down and put it somewhere where you'll see it every day. Clarity in what you're allowed and not allowed to do during the declutter will prove key to its success.
To succeed, you must also spend this period trying to rediscover what's important to you and what you enjoy outside the world of the always-on, shiny digital. You're more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide.
You want to arrive at the end of the declutter having rediscovered the type of activities that generate real satisfaction, enabling you to confidently craft a better life-one in which technology serves only a supporting role for more meaningful ends.
For each optional technology that you're considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value?
Once a technology passes this first screening question, it must then face a more difficult standard: Is this technology the best way to support this value?
How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?
They would never simply say, "I use Facebook because it helps my social life." They would instead declare something more specific, such as: "I check Facebook each Saturday on my computer to see what my close friends and family are up to; I don't have the app on my phone; I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships."
Regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being.
Solitude Deprivation - A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically.
In 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn't matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. They're useful, but it's hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital.
To live permanently without these devices would be needlessly annoying, but to regularly spend a few hours away from them should give you no pause.
On a regular basis, go for long walks, preferably somewhere scenic. Take these walks alone, which means not just by yourself, but also, if possible, without your phone. If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram-you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits. If you cannot abandon your phone for logistical reasons, then put it at the bottom of a backpack so you can use it in an emergency but cannot easily extract it at the first hint of boredom.
Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking.
Our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it's this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world.
The more you use social media, the less time you tend to devote to offline interaction, and therefore the worse this value deficit becomes-leaving the heaviest social media users much more likely to be lonely and miserable.
The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend's wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can't come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend.
If you adopt conversation-centric communication, you'll still likely rely on text-messaging services to simplify information gathering, or to coordinate social events, or to ask quick questions, but you'll no longer participate in open-ended, ongoing text-based conversations throughout your day. The socializing that counts is real conversation, and text is no longer a sufficient alternative.
Don't click "Like." Ever. And while you're at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No "so cute!" or "so cool!" Remain silent.
Keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default.
If you're worried about emergencies, you can easily adjust the settings so calls from a selected list (your spouse, your kid's school) do come through. You can also set a schedule that turns the phone to this mode automatically during predetermined times.
When you're in this mode, text messages become like emails: if you want to see if anyone has sent you something, you must turn on your phone and open the app. You can now schedule specific times for texting-consolidated sessions in which you go through the backlog of texts you received since the last check, sending responses as needed and perhaps even having some brief back-and-forth interaction before apologizing that you have to go, turning the phone back to Do Not Disturb mode, and continuing with your day.
EXAMPLE: He tells them that he's always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. There's no need to schedule a conversation or let him know when you plan to call-just dial him up. As it turns out, 5:30 is when he begins his traffic-clogged commute home in the Bay Area. He decided at some point that he wanted to put this daily period of car confinement to good use, so he invented the 5:30 rule.
Conversation office hours strategy - Put aside set times on set days during which you're always available for conversation. Depending on where you are during this period, these conversations might be exclusively on the phone or could also include in-person meetings. Once these office hours are set, promote them to the people you care about. When someone instigates a low-quality connection (say, a text message conversation or social media ping), suggest they call or meet you during your office hours sometime when it is convenient for them. Similarly, once office hours are in place, it's easy to reach out proactively to people you care about and invite them to converse with you during these hours whenever they're next available.
When any student writes me to ask a question, or request advice, or share their experience with one of my books, I can point them to my regular office hours and say, "Stop by or call anytime." And they do. The result is that I'm much better connected to the student body at my university than I would be if I were still trying to arrange a custom-scheduled interaction for every request that came my way.
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
The simplest way to become more handy is to learn a new skill, apply it to repair, learn, or build something, and then repeat.
My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks.
Schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. That is, work out the specific time periods during which you'll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming.
It doesn't matter if it's a local sporting league, a committee at your temple, a local volunteer group, the PTA, a social fitness group, or a fantasy gamers club: few things can replicate the benefits of connecting with your fellow citizens, so get up, get out, and start reaping these benefits in your own community.
strategize your free time - A seasonal leisure plan is something that you put together three times a year: at the beginning of the fall (early September), at the beginning of the winter (January), and at the beginning of summer (early May).
A good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season.
The Weekly Leisure Plan - Come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. For each of the objectives in the seasonal plan, figure out what actions you can do during the week to make progress on these objectives, and then, crucially, schedule exactly when you'll do these things.
To repeat a line from the New Yorker writer George Packer, "[Twitter] scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry."
If you're going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention. This practice, in other words, suggests that you remove all social media apps from your phone. You don't have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go.
If you don't need social media for your work, for example, set up a schedule that blocks these sites and apps completely with the exception of a few hours in the evening.
Stutzman programmed his own tool to block the network connections on his computer for set amounts of time. He called it, appropriately enough, Freedom.
Jennifer does not see social media as a particularly good source of entertainment. She does use Instagram to follow accounts from a small number of communities related to their interests-a sufficiently narrow focus that it typically takes only a few minutes to browse all new posts since the last check.
Jennifer invests significant effort in selecting who they follow-focusing on high-quality thinkers, or similar influencers in their topic area. In their academic account, for example, Jennifer follows a curated list of journalists, technologists, academics, and policy makers.
Approach social media as if you're the director of emerging media for your own life. Have a careful plan for how you use the different platforms, with the goal of "maximizing good information and cutting out the waste."
Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he's receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed.
Worried about the inconvenience of maintaining two different numbers? There's now a solution for this scenario as well: the tethered dumb phone. These products, which include, notably, a Kickstarter darling called the Light Phone, don't replace your existing smartphone, but instead extend it to a simpler form.
Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value-not as sources of value themselves.
They don't accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they're comfortable missing out on everything else.