Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

But as is becoming increasingly clear to those who have attempted these types of minor corrections, willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape—the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed.

Long before Henry David Thoreau exclaimed “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

...Thoreau lived off the generosity of his benefactors and Marcus Aurelius was a rich boy who inherited his title from his uncle.

This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. You’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds.

Yes but see most of my friends these days are online because even my local friends have mostly moved

After a mind-opening experience at Burning Man, Harris, in a move straight out of a Cameron Crowe screenplay, wrote a 144-slide manifesto titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.”

So...he had a bad trip and decided to blow up his life. Not making a great case for credibility here and I already agree with the guy

Digital Minimalism 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.

Not all digital minimalists end up completely rejecting common tools. For many, the core question of “is this the best way to use technology to support this value?” leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

When analyzed through Thoreau’s new economics, this exchange can come across as ill conceived. Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life?

Having travelled business class: yes.

“We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.”

You didn't reevaluate, you were hit with a sexually transmitted pandemic that increased the visibility of far right Chiristians and directly led to the hellscape that is the current far right

In my experience, gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well—the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started.

Not wrong

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.

A nontrivial number of people ended up aborting this process before the full thirty days were done. Interestingly, most of these early exits had little to do with insufficient willpower—this was an audience who was self-selected based on their drive to improve. More common were subtle mistakes in implementation. A typical culprit, for example, was technology restriction rules that were either too vague or too strict. Another mistake was not planning what to replace these technologies with during the declutter period—leading to anxiety and boredom.

My general heuristic is the following: consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

A young management consultant named Daria admitted that during the first days of the experiment she would compulsively pull out her phone before realizing she had removed all of the social media and news apps. The only thing left on her phone that she could check for new information was the weather. “In that first week,” she told me, “I knew the hourly weather conditions in three to four different cities”—the compulsion to browse something was too strong to ignore.

Lol been there

The goal of a digital declutter, however, is not simply to enjoy time away from intrusive technology. During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.

To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

PART 2 Practices

How is this only a quarter of the way through the book? You've covered everything

Soon after their initial meeting, Kethledge and Erwin decided to co-write a book on the topic of solitude. It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.

On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude. In addition to direct conversation with another person, these inputs can also take the form of reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV, or performing just about any activity that might draw your attention to a smartphone screen.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the entirety of Storr’s list of remarkable lives, as well as many of the other historical examples cited above, focus on men. As Virginia Woolf argued in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree with Storr that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

Did not expect this addition from a dude. Which is actually kind of ironic when you think about it

If you stood on a busy city street corner in the early 1990s, you would not see too many people sporting black foam Sony earphones on their way to work.

::raises hand:: My walkman and then discman went everywhere with me from the moment I got my first one when I was nine. The only reason guys in suits didn't carry them more often was that wearing headphones in public was largely considered rude and unsociable until the advent of the earbud

To put this in context, previous technologies that threatened solitude, from Thoreau’s telegraph to Storr’s car phone, introduced new ways to occasionally interrupt time alone with your thoughts, whereas the iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.

...Do other people not continue to have random thoughts when there's music on?

This transformation started by the iPod, however, didn’t reach its full potential until the release of its successor, the iPhone, or, more generally, the spread of modern internet-connected smartphones in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds (think: waiting to be called into a meeting), or it might be socially awkward to do so (think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service). The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance.

Lol y'all just need to go to a conservative or orthodox shul: no phones allowed on premises Also my grandma would teleport to my side and smack the back of my head if i even thought about taking out my phone during any religious service

Young people born between 1995 and 2012, a group Twenge calls “iGen,” exhibited remarkable differences as compared to the Millennials that preceded them. One of the biggest and most troubling changes was iGen’s psychological health. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed,” Twenge writes, with much of this seemingly due to a massive increase in anxiety disorders. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

I want to say that's alarmist, but having taken classes with these kids: yeah, they're kinda fucked up 2025 update: We're now seeing statistically significant (though still small) improvements in adolescent well-being despite no change in tech or social media use, drawing this theory into question

The details of this practice are simple: 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.

This sounds like hell for someone who regularly fights with intrusive thoughts

I once even took my dog for a short walk while a hurricane worked its way past Washington, DC, though, in retrospect, this was probably not a smart decision.

Eh. DC hurricanes barely count. I used to walk to 7-11 for slushies during them

I have a stack of twelve black, pocket-size Moleskine notebooks on the top shelf of a bookcase in my home office. A thirteenth notebook is currently in my work bag. Given that I bought my first Moleskine in the summer of 2004, and I’m writing these words in the early fall of 2017, this works out to about one notebook per year.

At least try a Leuchtturm bro. Moleskine sucks 2025: Moleskine still sucks. Also, one a year is amateur. I'm currently averaging one every 6-8 weeks

My Moleskine notebooks are not exactly diaries because I don’t write in them on a regular schedule.

My god. You are the person The New Diary introduction was written for 2025: They're diaries. You're just a straight dude so you don't like admitting it

The competition is held in a mini boxing ring with a podium in the middle. The first contestant wears glasses and is dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeve, button-down shirt. He trips on the ropes trying to climb into the ring.

Lol

Finally, it’s worth noting that refusing to use social media icons and comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbit—in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Here’s my tough love reassurance: let them go. The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so—the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere. Humans have maintained rich and fulfilling social lives for our entire history without needing the ability to send a few bits of information each month to people we knew briefly during high school. Nothing about your life will notably diminish when you return to this steady state.

Spoken like someone who's never dropped in on an old flatmate halfway around the world for a weekend of hanging out after years of only logistically being able to connect via email and social media

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.

Mate this is how I've used texting since I got my first cell phone

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.

This sounds like hell

Coffee shop hours are also popular. In this variation, you pick some time each week during which you settle into a table at your favorite coffee shop with the newspaper or a good book. The reading, however, is just the backup activity. You spread the word among people you know that you’re always at the shop during these hours with the hope that you soon cultivate a rotating group of regulars that come hang out.

I feel like a park would be a better option for this. No reason to play into the continued destruction of free communal spaces. Also, post-covid era. Outside = lower transmission risk even while unmasked

Taking a page out of the English cultural playbook, you can also consider running these office hours once a week during happy hour at a favored bar.

Not if you want to be able to hear anyone

If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.

Been there

many minimalists will describe a phenomenon in which digital habits that they previously felt to be essential to their daily schedule suddenly seemed frivolous once they became more intentional about what they did with their time. When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.

Tried that. ADHD forgot by the third day

As Liz explained to me when I asked her about this decision, moving to a homestead of this size was not a choice made lightly. Their long gravel driveway, for example, requires constant maintenance. If a tree falls, it needs to be sawed and removed, “even if it’s ten below outside.” If it’s snowing, they must plow often, or the snow pile will become too deep for the tractor to push, trapping them on their property—which is not ideal, as their nearest neighbor is a long hike away and they don’t have cell service to let them know they need help.

This sounds like hell

Liz and Nate heat their home with wood from their property, which also turns out to require quite a bit of effort. “We spend the whole summer harvesting wood,” Liz told me. “You have to go into the forest, identify the trees to bring down, then you have to buck the logs, bring them on-site, split them, stack them, while also being careful to monitor the wood stove as it heats.” And, as it turns out, if you want to enjoy cleared fields surrounding your house, “you have to mow . . . a lot.”

Again: hell. And completely unsustainable if one or both of you become disabled--which is basically a guarantee of living to an advanced age

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

You will pry my vapid romance novels from my cold dead hands

In a culture where screens replace craft, Crawford argues, people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill. One way to understand the exploding popularity of social media platforms in recent years is that they offer a substitute source of aggrandizement. In the absence of a well-built wood bench or applause at a musical performance to point toward, you can instead post a photo of your latest visit to a hip restaurant, hoping for likes, or desperately check for retweets of a clever quip. But as Crawford implies, these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.” Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.

Wondering how you'd define photography and apps specifically dedicated to the photographer/enthusiast community (say, Vero instead of Instagram). Or most fine art, really. It's more subjective than building a table that doesn't wobble

Because this chapter is about leisure—that is, efforts you voluntarily undertake in your free time—I’m going to propose that we stick to the stricter definition of craft promoted by the above arguments. If you want to fully extract the benefits of this craft in your free time, in other words, seek it in its analog forms, and while doing so, fully embrace Rogowski’s closing advice: “Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.”

Listen, I did years of film photography--way more than most people my age. Digital editing tools are a million times more satisfying and significantly less expensive

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

Not giving up my photography or typing rather than trying to write 600k of fic longhand

To an FNG like me, this definition makes no sense. But then again, that’s the point. By the time you do understand what it means to pull a Bobby Cremins, you’ll have earned a satisfying sense of having been accepted by a tribe. This pursuit of inclusion is perhaps best exemplified by the circle-of-trust ritual that ends each workout. During the ritual, each participant gives their own name and their F3 nickname before offering some words of wisdom or gratitude. If you’re new to the group, you’re given a nickname on the spot—an initiation.

This sounds like hell. Also like it's filled with really annoying people

The Planet Fitness near my house costs $10 a month—a price that includes free Wi-Fi. The CrossFit box near my house costs $210 a month, and if you ask them about Wi-Fi, they’ll chase you out the door with a kettlebell.

Lmao they probably would though

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

My socially anxious self is going to have to give a straight up 'no' to this one. New people? In new situations? That I can't pre-evaluate and prepare for? Do you *want* to make me spend all that introspective soltiude time having panic attacks?

PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK

...Does cooking count? Because I live in an apartment

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks.

Here’s my suggestion: 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. When you get to these periods, anything goes. If you want to binge-watch Netflix while live-streaming yourself browsing Twitter: go for it. But outside these periods, stay offline.

Tried that. The limits are fake, my brain ignores them before I can catch it

On the other hand, if you’re simply corralling these behaviors to specific periods, it becomes much harder for the skeptical part of your mind to mount a strong case. You’re not quitting anything or losing access to any information, you’re simply being more mindful of when you engage with this part of your leisure life. It’s difficult to paint such a reasonable restriction as untenable, which makes it more likely to last.

Lmao tell that to my pathological demand avoidance. It's like trying to rationalise with an overstimulated toddler

PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING

No.

I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

This is the sort of torture only Ben Franklin could come up with