digital minimalism, by cal newport

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am excited by the benefits it may bring. Here’s what it’s about.

The Premise

The premise of this book is simple and something I’m sure everyone can relate to: our irresistible attraction to our screens is resulting in a loss of autonomy when deciding how to spend our time.

In regaining autonomy, minor hacks will not get to the root of the problem. The apps and content we have access to are like slot machines in our pocket – they are simply too addictive. The 2 ingredients that make a technology able to cultivate unhealthy use are:

• Intermittent Positive Reinforcement: Rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern, which is what social media provides
• Drive for Social Approval: The desire for approval is an evolutionary trait stemming back to Paleolithic times when your standing in a tribe was crucial to survival

To overcome this, you need a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, i.e. digital minimalism. With digital minimalism, you focus your 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.

This contrasts with the maximalist approach most of us employ, where any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology. 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. 

Principles of Digital Minimalism

• Clutter is Costly: More is less. Clutter is dangerous because it is easy to be seduced by an app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess – the minutes of our life
• Optimization is Important: You need to think about how you will use the technologies you retain. If you look at the law of diminishing returns, most of us are at the early stage of the return curve in terms of how we use technology. By being more deliberate about its use, we can move up the return curve and extract more value
• Intentionality is Satisfying: Part of what makes digital minimalism so effective is that the very act of being selective brings satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools that are being avoided.

The Digital Declutter

This is a rapid transformation executed with conviction. It is a 3 step process:

• Define Your Technology Rules: Define the “optional technologies” you want to take a break from. Consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life. Write down the banned technologies and put the list somewhere highly visible
• Take a 30 Day Break: This detox can be challenging. You must spend this period rediscovering what is important to you outside your tech world, i.e. you must have a well-developed leisure life. The end goal is to rediscover the activities that provide genuine satisfaction, enabling you to craft a better life – one in which technology serves only a supporting role for more meaningful ends
• Reintroduce Technology: To allow an optional technology back into your life, it must:
  • Serve something you deeply value (some benefit is not enough)
  • Be the best way to use technology to serve this value
  • Have a role in your life that is constrained with an operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it

Solitude

All humans benefit from regular doses of solitude. Solitude is not about physical separation. It is a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people, and instead focus on your own thoughts and experiences. 

Regular doses of solitude, mixed with our default mode of sociality are necessary to flourish as a human being. Solitude leads to new ideas or understandings of the self and counterintuitively, can lead to closeness to others. 

With smartphones always offering a quick glance, it is possible in today’s world to completely banish solitude from your life. This is referred to as solitude deprivation – a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your thoughts and free from input from other minds. The effects of solitude deprivation are particularly pronounced in those born after 1995, who entered their pre-teen years with constant access to technology. The result is the worst mental health crisis ever seen. 

Some simple practices to avoid solitude deprivation:

• Leave Your Phone at Home: Try to do a little bit of this on most days
• Take Long Walks: On a regular basis, go for long walks, preferably somewhere scenic and without your phone
• Write Letters to Yourself: This is an incredibly effective practice that frees you from outside inputs and provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to organize your thinking

Social Animals

Human beings are social animals. Research has shown that when given downtime, our brains default to thinking about our social life. Social media is dangerous because the more time you use it to interact with your network, the less time you devote to offline communication. Digital communication tools have a way of forcing a trade-off between conversation and connection. To overcome this, you must reform your relationship with technology to allow for more analog communication. Cal recommends:

• Do Not Click Like: Stop using social media as a tool for low-quality relationship nudges
• Consolidate Texting: Use “Do Not Disturb” and schedule specific times for texting
• Hold Conversation Office Hours: Put aside set times on set days when you’re always available (i.e. commuting) and promote these hours to people you care about

High-Quality Leisure

Potentially first identified by Aristotle, a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates, i.e. high-quality leisure. 

To be successful with digital minimalism, you must renovate what you do with your free time. You must cultivate high-quality leisure before culling your worst digital habits. Leisure lessons:

• Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. It’s more energizing and fulfilling
• Embrace arts and crafts, to produce valuable things in the physical world
• Seek activities that require real-world structured social interactions

The goal of this is to escape passive interaction with your screen as being the primary pleasure, with a state where leisure time is filled with better pursuits, many of which exist in the physical world. Practices to implement this:

• Fix or Build Something Every Week: This taps into our natural instinct for manipulating objects in the physical world
• Schedule Low-Quality Leisure: Work out specific time periods when you’ll indulge in social media, streaming, etc.
• Join Something: Examples include a volunteer group or a sports league. There are many benefits to connecting with fellow citizens
• Follow Leisure Plans: Plan out your leisure time

At the end of the day, it is important to recognize that doing nothing is overrated. Decompression sessions have their place but their rewards are muted as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities. 

Attention Economy

The attention economy is the business sector that makes money by gathering consumer’s attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. Practices to escape the attention-engineered services that come with digital technology include:

• Delete Social Media from Your Phone: Smartphone versions of these services are much more adept at hijacking your attention
• Turn Devices into Single Purpose Computers: Use tools (like Freedom) to make your general-purpose devices into being effectively single purpose at any moment. Services should be blocked by default and made available on an intentional schedule
• Use Social Media like a Professional: Have a careful plan for how you use different platforms, with the goal of maximizing good information and cutting out the waste
• Embrace Slow Media: Commit to maximizing the quality of what you consume and the conditions under which you consume it
• Dumb Down Your Smartphone: Or even replace it with a brick phone

Ultimately, the result of digital technology is a society left reeling by unintended consequences. In this consumerist age, we eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling us, but soon realized that in doing so, we were accidentally degrading our humanity.

One way to reach harmony with technology is through digital minimalism – the concept of using technology to support things you deeply value, and not as a source of value itself. Remember, the key to sustained success is accepting that it’s not really about technology, but it is instead about the quality of your life.